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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



AN INTRODUCTION 



TO THE STUDY OF 



JACOB BOEHME'S WRITINGS 



By A. J/ PENNY 



NEW YORK 



1 901 






THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

MAY. 9 1901 

COPYWGHT ENTHY 

CLASsJflrxXc. H: 
COPY A. 



COPYRIGHT 1901 
By Grace Shaw Duff 



PREFACE 

This modern day thought, that, feeling life and vigor 
flowing by unused vehicles iff unfrequented channels calls 
itself "new," can find its. prototype .among all peoples and 
in all ages, and is a factor more or less evident in all phi- 
losophies and all religions. * * ,w " 

No seer in recent years has climbed to greater heights or 
seen with clearer vision than Jacob Boehme, a simple Ger- 
man shoemaker, who faithful to his humble calling, voiced 
this same ''new thought" nearly three hundred years ago. 
Such men are "discovered" periodically, when others, 
growing up to their directness, see a little further along 
"the way," and no one has left burning a brighter torch 
for willing— 'tho perchance faltering footsteps, than the 
earnest student, some of whose essays have been gathered 
for the making of this book ; and I can fancy no greater 
delight coming to her than the thought that her words 
may induce some to turn to that great mine of "wisdom 
and truth," where she herself delved for treasure but little 
suspected and less known even by those whose Spirit leads 
them into such search. 

In these essays the reader learns to love the disciple 
while studying the Master, and gladly follows where she 
leads, until he determines to put his feet into that same 
narrow way that leads straight to the garden, the leaves of 
whose tree, are for the healing of the nations. 

Anne Judith Brown was the youngest child of the Rev. 
Walter Brown, Rector of Stonesfield Oxon. and Prebendary 
of Canterbury, and of Eliza Brown, nee Frith, his wife. 
She was the youngest of thirteen children and lost both 
parents when a child of six. She was then brought up by an 
elder sister, but very soon grew too independent to be 



iv Preface 

really guided by sister or brother, 'tho she was always most 
dutiful in her conduct to them. 

From a small child she was a voracious reader, and it was 
in those days so difficult to supply a child with suitable 
books that her mother undertook to write some herself, 
with a special view to this youngest child's requirements; 
— "Children as They Are," "Sister Mary's Tales," "Trans- 
formation of a Beech Tree" — and later — "The Parables 
Explained" — were written chiefly for little Anne. Her 
girlhood was passed at one or other of her clergyman 
brothers' homes, and with one clever sister who shared her 
literary tastes and studies, but the life was such a secluded 
one, that being of a highly sensitive nature and always in 
delicate health she grew morbid from want of more whole- 
some occupation and outlet. 

While still a girl she developed spinal disease and en- 
dured great suffering in consequence. This drove her 
more entirely into literary pursuits and she wrote with great 
facility and power of expression, as is shown by her early 
journals, etc. About 1855 she began writing for young 
girls and published, "Morning Clouds"; this was followed 
by "The Afternoon of Life," " Wanted, a Home," and one 
or two smaller volumes. 

But underlying all this lighter work was her real absorb- 
ing life interest — the study of Jacob Boehme. She owed 
her first introduction to Boehme to a much beloved and 
revered old friend, Rev. E. Marriner, Rector of Fortscray, 
who taught her much, and strongly influenced her by his 
life. Next to Boehme, de St. Martin was the writer who 
claimed her attention, as an interpreter and guide to the 
former, and it was in studying de St. Martin's books that 
she made the acquaintance of his translator, Mr. Edward 
Burton Penny, to whom she was married October 3, 1865, 
and the six following years— for Mr. Penny died March, 
1872 — she looked upon as the happiest in her life. They 
were in perfect sympathy in their appreciation of Boehme, 



and it was by her husband's express wish that she discon- 
tinued her writing of fiction and gave all her attention to 
Theosophy and kindred subjects — and it was at this time 
and under these circumstances that most of the Boehme 
essays were written, and even a casual reader must be 
struck by their wide catholicity, accompanied by a single- 
ness of purpose. It was characteristic of such a nature that 
much of her time and strength was given to those who 
came to her for help and direction, and it was not until all 
these had been answered that she turned, often late at 
night, to the study of her beloved Master. 

Mrs. Penny died, at the age of sixty-eight, at "The 
Cottage," Cullompton Down, December 18, 1893. 

I desire to express my appreciation of the interest and 
sympathy I have received from Mrs. Penny's friends and 
relatives in collecting these essays, and the help which Mr. 
A. Neilson, the former editor of Light, has most generously- 
given me. 

Grace Shaw Duff. 
925 Madison Ave., 
New York City. 



CONTENTS 

Who was Jacob Boehme i 

Jacob Boehme's Writings i i 

On the World-Soul 46 

Looking Glasses 67 

The Image 81 

Resurrection Bodies 92 

Eternal Bodies 97 

Form 105 

Boehme and Rama Prasad i 18 

Spiritual Enemies 126 

Ready-Made Clothes 165 

Imagination and Phantasy 171 

Spiritual Evolution 182 



JACOB BOEHME 

WHO WAS JACOB BOEHME? 

One of the most remarkable cases of spiritual mediumship, 
in the highest sense ; of a man chosen by God for revealing 
knowledge that he himself had never sought, and did not 
understand, while at the urgent dictates of an invisible 
guide he wrote what was communicated to him. The say- 
ing of our Lord that as " the wind bloweth where it listeth, 
and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence 
it cometh and whither it goeth, so is every one that is born 
of the Spirit," is true of the knowledge born of the Spirit 
also : it was never more strikingly proved than in the case 
of Boehme. To this unlearned shoemaker, living more 
than two centuries ago in an obscure town of Germany, we 
owe revelations so profound, so various, and so divinely 
central, that while in nothing do they contradict the Holy 
Scriptures, in many points they supplement, in many more 
they explain and emphatically confirm, its teaching. The 
Bible would not have for me half the depth of meaning it 
has if this more recent messenger of God had not poured 
light on some of its most perplexing passages : a light to 
which human reason could never have won, but for which 
he had unconsciously made himself ready by intense single- 
ness of purpose in seeking the one only refuge for the soul 
of man. "I never desired," he says in one of his letters, 
"to know anything of the divine mystery, much less un- 
derstood I the way how the seek or find it ; I knew noth- 
ing of it, as is the condition of poor laymen in their simpli- 
city. I sought only after the heart of Jesus Christ, that I 
might hide myself from the wrathful anger of God and the 
violent assaults of the devil ; and I besought the Lord ear- 



2 Jacob Boehme 

nestly for His holy spirit and His grace that He would be 
pleased to bless and guide me in Him." — [Epistle II., par. 6.] 
So seeking he found. With that ardent and humble approach 
to "the Centre" — to which he so often invites others to 
follow — he won access to the unsearchable riches of Christ, 
in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. 
These were opened to him in such unwonted measure, that 
to this day they have not been even approximately esti- 
mated at their true value ; and a future generation will 
wonder why, when such writings were extant, any one 
could think that inspiration from on high ended with the 
writers of the New Testament, or that the promise of guid- 
ance into all truth, far more than the immediate followers 
of Jesus Christ were able to bear, had been broken, and 
eighteen centuries pass away with no further utterance of 
the spirit of truth. 

But for facts. Born in 1575, Boehme was as a youth ap- 
prenticed to a shoemaker at Goriitz in Saxony ; married to 
a daughter of a butcher in 1594, and had four sons, all of 
whom he brought up to some trade. While still a lad, alone 
in his master's shop, busily sweeping it out, we read of his 
having an interview with a mysterious stranger, who, after 
buying a pair of shoes, spoke very impressively to him of 
his duties and his future, and this is supposed by his biog- 
raphers to have influenced his conduct, making him more 
zealous in all religious exercises, more studious of the Bible, 
more earnest in striving to live blamelessly. The natural 
consequence of such endeavor was a keener sense of sin, 
with that tumult of conflicting desires and reactionary evil 
impulse which so often precedes the outburst of victorious 
light. 

Truly it is, darkest before the dawning with very many, 
as Boehme seems to have experienced. But while he tells 
us of the fierce onsets of the enemies of the soul, he cannot 
find words glad enough or expressive enough to describe 
what followed. "I wrestled, in God's assistance, a good 



Jacob Boehme 3 

space of time for the crown of victory, which I afterwards, 
with the breaking open of the gate of the deep in the centre 
of Nature, attained with very great joy." — [Apology I., Part 
I., par. 25.] 

At the age of twenty-five he was first consciously over- 
taken by "the Spirit of the Light, which loved him exceed- 
ingly." — [Ibid, par. 33.] Walking one day in the fields, 
the mystery of creation was opened to him suddenly, and, 
as he narrates, " in one quarter of an hour I saw and knew 
more than if I had been many years together at an univer- 
sity, at which I did exceedingly admire, and I knew not 
how it happened to me ; and thereupon I turned my heart 
to praise God for it. For I saw and knew the Being of all 
beings, the Bvss and Abyss, 1 also the birth or eternal gener- 
ation of the Holy Trinity ; the descent and original of this 
world, and of ail creatures through the divine wisdom ; I 
knew and saw in myself all the three worlds, namely, the 
divine, angelical, and paradisical world ; and then the dark 
world, being the original of nature to fire ; 8 and then, 
thirdly, the external and visible world, being a procreation 
or external birth ; or as a substance spoken forth from both 
the internal and spiritual worlds ; and I saw and knew the 
whole being (or working essence) in the evil and in the 
good, and the mutual original and existence of each of 
them." . . . " I saw it (as in a great deep) in the in- 
ternal, for I had a thorough view of the universe, as in a 
chaos, where all things are couched and wrapped up, but 
it was impossible for me to explicate and unfold the same." 
—[Epistle II., par. 8.] 

1 "God," Boehme has told us, "is in Himself the Abyss without any will 
at all." . . . " He maketh Himself a ground or By ss." 

2 "Original to fire " is a translation which proves either imperfect grasp of 
the meaning of the writer, or want of sympathy with the reader's mind. 
Dionysius Freher only could adequately explain the justice of those word s, 
exchanging to for of which evidently it was meant to be, the original becom- 
ing of fire caused by the intense fri&ion of astringency and mobility in the 
darkness which precedes its outburst. 



4 Jacob Boehme 

But it was ten years later, when, finding these unsought 
riches of revelation come to him more and more, that he 
first tried to record their purport. He wrote the "Aurora " 
— his first work — for a help to his own memory in 1612. 
After a while he lent the manuscript to a friend, by whose 
agency it got into the hands of a gentleman who was so 
much impressed with its unique value that he had it un- 
stitched and copied from end to end by many different 
hands before it was returned ; and this transcript, getting 
abroad, fell under the eyes of the authorities of Gorlitz, As 
a matter of course it was vehemently condemned, chiefly 
by its Primate, Gregory Richter. 

A religious writer who presumes to teach more than con- 
temporaneous religious teachers know, and to understand 
what they deem an impenetrable mystery, is sure to be de- 
nounced as a heretic, a heretic all the more dangerous if, as 
in this case, the bringer of new things is evidently devout, 
and impugns, not the words of Scripture, but the wisdom 
of its interpreters, in supposing current meanings to be all 
that are contained, or that are to be found in it. This — and 
an unsparing rebuke of evil wherever it was, high or low, 
decent or gross — was the unpardonable sin of Boehme : to 
this day unpardoned by every reader who is not in good 
earnest fighting against self with Christ and for Christ. To 
those who are not, his writings may be interesting ; to 
every thinker they would be, for " if a man would satisfy 
the human mind so that it may give itself up into the eter- 
nal rest, then a man must show him the root of the tree out 
of which spirit and flesh hath its origin." — [Considerations 
of Threefold Life, par. 2}.] And Boehme alone offers to 
show it, —but for this repulsive severity of reprobation, this 
obnoxious thoroughness of unconventional Christianity, 
which lays bare the cunning of self-deception under every 
kind of "devout shows," and presses on unwilling minds 
the " rude uncouth message" that in all the world there is 
no such cruel evil beast as that harbored in the breast of 



Jacob Boehme 5 

every man and woman,— self-love. In saying this, I by no 
means assert the converse. The most sincere conversion 
of the will from self-seeking to the obedience of Christ does 
not secure a liking for books so obscure as his. They 
bristle with terms so unusual, and thoughts so unlike the 
accepted coin of the religious world, that for a large major- 
ity of readers repulse must at first be far stronger than at- 
traction. A little patience, a little passing over what has no 
meaning at first, and dwelling on the sublime intensity of 
clearest utterance which is to be found in almost every page, 
and vigorous intellects will be more stimulated than baffled. 
But all minds are not vigorous, neither have all leisure for 
such exercise. 

What embitters ordinary Christians more than anything 
else in this old teacher, is that he takes ignorance as to 
spiritual mysteries for proof positive of arrest in Christian 
life. Again and again he meets the charge of speculating 
beyond bounds of holy awe, with the counter charge that 
if we were led by the Spirit more and more would be re- 
vealed to us of the deep things of God, and that the going 
on unto perfection to which St. Paul exhorts would include 
increase of knowledge as well as greater holiness of life. 
In his Apology or defense against Gregory Richter he justly 
says : " You say that I will search out the Deity, and call it 
devilish ; thereby you show your ignorance to the daylight, 
that you understand nothing of the Book of Nature, and 
also do not read the New Testament, for St. Paul saith, 
1 The spirit sear cheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. ' 
It is not of man's ability, but God's Spirit performeth that 
searching through man's spirit." — [4th Apology, Part I., 
pars. 44, 45.] 

Recognition of this was at once his own safeguard and 
his credential as a man sent by God. Speaking of his own 
writing, he said : "I cannot say that I have comprehended 
it, but so long as the hand of God stayeth upon me, I un- 
derstand it ; but if it hides itself, then I know not my own 



6 Jacob Boehme 

labor, and am made a stranger to the work of my own 
hands. Whereby I may see how altogether impossible a 
thing it is to search out and apprehend the mysteries of 
God without God's Spirit." . . . " If it be His will for 
me to know anything, then I will know it ; but if He will- 
eth it not, then do I so also. / will be nothing and dead, 
that He may live and work in me what Hepleaseth. I have 
cast myself wholly into Him that so I may be safe." — [3rd 
Epistle, pars. 2} and 24.] 

It is doubtless owing to this attitude of deepest humility 
and self-abnegation that he was so absolutely free from all 
the unbalanced excitement of visionaries ; and were it not 
for his strong sense of the sublime uses of the humblest 
business on earth, his knowledge of the latent powers in 
man, and perception of his original greatness, might have 
tended to disqualify him for the details of practical duty ; 
but while asserting that "the soul is a sparkle out of the 
great omnipotency of God" [ 3rd Apologv, Text I., par. 1 12] 
— that "by the will God created heaven and earth, and such 
a mighty will is hidden also in the soul" [Threefold Life, 
chap. 8, par. 18] — he never lost sight of the nothingness 
and impotency of man as he now is, until Christ is formed 
in him, and every imagination is brought into obedience to 
Christ. No exaltation of self, because of the abundance of 
revelations, was possible to one who so well understood 
that mortification of self-will and recipiency of grace is all 
that a human creature can do in "working out its own sal- 
vation." "The soul hath free will to go out and in, but it 
cannot generate itself in Christ ; it must only go out of its 
own evil will, and enter into God's mercy." . . . "I 
lie in imbecility," he adds, "as a dying man, but the Most 
High raiseth me up in His breath, so that I go according to 
His wind." — [3rd Apology, Text IV., Point I., pars. 47 and 

49-] 

Some of the most learned of his fellow-countrymen 
sought him out for instruction on the mysteries of the 



Jacob Boehme 7 

natural as well as the spiritual world ; and it is notorious 
that from his writings Sir Isaac Newton in England, and 
Hegel in Germany, drew what the French call "les idees 
meres," to which their own fame has been largely due ; 
but Boehme himself lightly esteemed any knowledge that 
fell short of that which, as he expressed it, "opens to us 
the Paradisical gate in the inward center of our image, that 
the Paradisical light might shine to us in our minds," add- 
ing : "Seeing that Christ the Son of God hath generated us 
again to the Paradisical image, we should not be so remiss 
as to rely upon art and earthly reason ; for so we find not 
Paradise and Christ, who must become man in us if we 
will ever see God : in our reason it is all but dead and 
blind." — [Incarnation, Part I., chap. 4, pars. 6 and 8.] 

Yet never surely did a holy man so much exalt the uses 
of art and reason when rightly employed ; one of his great- 
est peculiarities is the stress he lays on the value of all 
earthly pursuits so long as they do not Jill and darken the 
mind. "Indeed, the divine wisdom standeth not in art 
and reason, but it showeth art the way, what it should do 
and how it should seek. Art is really the tool or instru- 
ment of God wherewith the divine wisdom worketh or 
laboureth ; why should I despise it." . . . . "All 
profitable arts are revealed out of God's wisdom • not that 
they are that by which man cometh to God, but for the 
government of the outward life, and for the glorious mani- 
festation of divine wisdom and omnipotence." — [ 3rd 
Apology, Text IV., pars. 73 and 77.] 

"Man must labour and trade, for therefore he is created 
into the outer world, that he should manifest God's won- 
ders with his skill and trading. All trades, businesses, and 
conditions are God's ordinance ; every one worketh the 
wonders of God." — [Threefold Life, chap. 17, par. 11.] 

How different is this aspect of worldly pursuits from that 
which pretends to contemn all interests and occupations of 
present life in order to throw into strong relief the glories 



8 Jacob Boehme 

and bliss of a future state! as if trying to denaturalise man 
was the best method for spiritual evolution! The result of 
this mistaken effort meets us at every turn, a spiritual fal- 
setto being too often adopted when the old Adam has not 
been so much mortified as ignored ; and the recoil from 
such unwholesome tension too often proves that heavenly- 
mindedness is not the usual effect of disdaining earthly 
good. Our old mystic held "the old ass," as he quaintly 
terms the natural man, in wiser estimation, and insists on 
its uses with regard to the new man, which is to be formed 
in it as gold is formed in the rough ore of its matrix. 

The persecution that he underwent after Gregory Richter 
had denounced him from the pulpit resulted in his being 
severely condemned for heresy, though on no one point 
could his judges find him guilty, but vaguely passed sen- 
tence on his writings upon "hearsay censure." He was 
forbidden to write any more, and to this order, with 
characteristic meekness, he submitted for six or seven years, 
quietly carrying on his shoemaker's craft meanwhile, till at 
last the dictates of his invisible guide, and the urgency of 
friends, led him to disregard the prohibition. Between the 
years 1618 and 1624 he wrote in quick succession the rest 
of his works [he wrote 31 in all] , each, as it seems, open- 
ing more deeply and impressing more earnestly the mysteries 
and lessons which he had been taught. 

In his 3rd Epistle, he gives a wonderful account of the 
"instigation of the Spirit," under which in nine months he 
wrote three of his most profound books. 

The disturbance raised in Gorlitz by his persecution 
obliged him to leave it for the sake of peace. He went to 
Dresden, where he resided until his death — after a short 
illness— in 1624. His last words were : "Now I go hence 
into Paradise." 

We are told that he was a small man of low stature, and 
the written account of his features in no way contradicts 



Jacob Boehme 9 

the impression given by his pictured likeness, of harsh and 
homely outlines illumined by a singular look of settled 
peace and intense inward activity. 

Boehme has many wonderful truths to tell us, and a 
solution to offer of many mysteries deemed inscrutable by 
most divines ; but the most priceless truth and the most 
unfailing pass-key to a treasury of spiritual knowledge 
which he presses upon us, in his every book, with ever 
new fervency, is the necessity of continued dying to self, 
and keeping the soul plunged in humility, patience, and 
love. A hard lesson practically, but how simple and easy 
to understand are the terms in which he gives it ! 'Thou 
wilt ask what is the new regeneration ? or how is that done 
in man ? Hear and see ; stop not thy mind, let not thy 
mind be filled by the spirit of this world with its might and 
pomp. Take thy mind and break through the spirit of this 
world quite : incline thy mind into the kind love of God : 
make thy purpose earnest and strong to break through the 
pleasure of this world with thy mind and not to regard it." 
— [Three Principles, chap. 16, par ; 48.] 

"Seek you nothing else but the Word and Heart of God : 
you need not break your mind with hard thoughts, for 
with such high fancies and conceits you will not find the 
Ground: do but only incline your mind and thoughts, with 
your whole reason, into the love and mercy of God, so that 
you be born out of the Word and Heart of God in the 
centre of your life, so that His light shine in the light of 
your life, that you be one with him." — [Threefold Life, 
chap. 3, par. 30.] 

And now, having so far learned who and what Boehme 
was from his own evidence as well as from the report of 
contemporary biographers, I think we can understand the 
accuracy of his prediction in the preface to his "Aurora." 
"Now, if Mr. Wiseling, which worketh with his wit in the 
fierce quality, gets this book" (any of his books) "into his 



io Jacob Boehme 

hand, he will oppose it, as there is always stirring and op- 
position between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom 
of hell." 

Yes, but as the King of Heaven is Omnipotent, all who 
resist His rule must yield at last : at last all conquering love 
will extirpate the venom of scorn, and prevail even on Mr. 
WiselingXo know "the meekness of wisdom," and all its 
resulting blessedness. "In the time of the lily," said 
Boehme, "my writings will be much sought after." Some 
little buds of that lily may be descried among us already. 



JACOB BOEHME'S WRITINGS 

" 'What is truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not stay 
for an answer." The turn of enquiry thus described by 
Francis Bacon is a marked characteristic of the present day. 
However ready and conclusive the answer may be, it is un- 
heeded if it requires patient and prolonged attention ; be- 
cause it is not satisfaction of the mind that is sought for by 
questioners so much as utterance of doubt. Uncertainty 
as to every point, which our forefathers held to be fixed 
articles of belief, is the favourite attitude of modern intel- 
lects. In this sea of doubt a large majority luxuriate, just 
as the habitually irresolute enjoy complaining of perplexities 
which, they say, admit of no possible solution. To the 
impatient mind total uncertainty gives a fallacious sense of 
freedom, and to the irresolute mind perplexity as to every 
line of action supplies excuse for sloth. The quickened 
thought of modern times necessarily unsettles a large class 
of intellects "that delight in giddiness and account it a 
bondage to fix a belief ; " and to such as these it would be 
vain to speak of Boehme. But they in every age are fol- 
lowers, not leaders, in human progress. Of a very differ- 
ent order are those which are now both ready and able to 
lead, if only they could convince themselves what is not un- 
truth. Too well aware of the vastness of spiritual science, 
to expect a brief and summary clearing up of its hitherto 
inscrutable mysteries, all they attempt to define is the 
amount of error that has over-laid authorised dogma ; and 
for them the process is often a long and bitter conflict, as 
every struggle to advance against current habits of thought 
must be. And the saddest part of the struggle is that it 
has to be made against modes of belief which are esteemed 
too holy to call in question, by people whose very good- 



12 Jacob Boebme 

ness makes any lack of wisdom more injurious than it 
could otherwise be. The narrow-minded pietist uncon- 
sciously drives stronger brained men and women into 
scepticism, by simplest means effecting complex results : 
for instance, the future world is spoken of — the devout 
bigot reverts to the almost obsolete idea of everlasting fire 
and brimstone torments external to the sinner, of divine 
vengeance. There is the quiet smile or outspoken sarcasm 
in reply, such a speaker being obviously unprepared for 
argument ; and these inflaming the zeal and blinding the 
judgment of the other by anger, prompt the accusation 
that the truth of God's Word is doubted, that the hard 
heart of unbelief has to be touched by more earnest ad- 
monition. Probably the heart in question is not at all hard, 
nor may any unbelief have been felt except as to the 
accuracy of this conception of the fate of impenitent sinners ; 
but it is clear that if any one is so unwise as to make this 
idea of it a test of Christian faith, he or she greatly lowers 
the claim of that faith upon any reasonable being ; for, find- 
ing these material torments regarded as an integral part of 
revealed truth, naturally leads to suspecting that all relig- 
ious doctrine is equally the outcome of superstition, and is 
too often followed by disbelief in any future that need be 
feared. The frequency of suicide gives terrific evidence of 
such disbelief. Even in our nurseries we might learn that 
a threat which does not intimidate emboldens a wrong- 
doer ; so does much of what has been called sound doc- 
trine. Men are told of God's never-ending punishment of 
sin — of torments intense and illimitable, but such alarms 
seldom take the least effect on cultivated minds. Thinkers 
cannot believe while conscious of so much mixture of good 
in people deservedly called bad, and of the many extenuat- 
ing peculiarities of fate which promote evil, that a God who 
pities as a father does his children, will seize on the soul as 
soon as it is hurried from mortal wrappings, and place it 



Jacob Boehme 13 

beyond remedy. I say they cannot, and I know they do 
not. 

Again, it is impossible for thoughtful people to avoid 
seeing that those will never be deterred from sin by threats 
of imposed penalties, who are taught that God promises on 
certain conditions to deliver from the consequences of sin. 
To the last they will assure themselves that He is so merci- 
ful that He will surely forgive and save, understanding by 
forgiveness an arbitrary decision of will, and by salvation 
escape from suffering. 

Now, it is for those to whom popular Christianity offers 
grave offence that Boehme's teaching will be what Fran^ 
Baader said it was, "the only means of deliverance from 
the prevailing destructive knowledge or want of know- 
ledge," J for, to use the words of a brave contemporary, 2 
"the truth requires to be proclaimed aloud that modern 
Christianity, as generally received, does not represent the 
teaching of Christ, and is not fit to be charged with the 
task of teaching the world a suitable and satisfactory mor- 
ality." This inability of professional guides to reconcile 
Christian dogma to profoundly searching intellects need not 
surprise us, seeing that they bind themselves by oath to 
follow prescribed lines of thought rather than the spirit of 
truth wheresoever that goeth, and take their credentials 
from external authority ; but the fact remains, the scoff and 
triumph of unbelievers. 

Jacob Boehme, a medium for the Holy Spirit nearly three 
centuries ago, will carry us farther towards central truths 
than any later seer, and will harmonise many a conflicting 
aspect of truth ; widely as its rays of light may diverge in 

1 u Das ein^ige Mittel der besserung gegen die herrschende destructive 
wissenschaft oder unwissenschaft ist. Deswegen J. Boehme keineswegs ein 
mann der Vergangenheit ist und bloss der Historie augehoert, sondern als ein 
mann der Gegenwart zur aufbahnung einer besseren Zukunft aner kannt wer- 
den muss." — Franz Baader's Brief an Dr. W. Strausky, 1838. 

2 The Rev. T. W. Fowle in Contemporary , May, 1872. 



14 Jacob Boehme 

their outermost issue, in closer promixity to the centre they 
will be found nearly related. 

"For whom," asked the late Mr. Christopher Walton, 
"are Boehme's writings useful, and what is their intent ? 
The writer would answer if he knew of any honest en- 
quiring minds, in a Christian country, that after a careful 
study of the Holy Scriptures, and much pondering upon 
the great mystery of things all around and within them, 
especially upon the seeming incompatibleness of the bloody 
cruelty, misery and shocking injustice which are daily and 
with impunity perpetrated, and likewise recounted in the 
Old Testament itself, with the nature and character of the 
Deity as described in the Christian revelation as an Omni- 
potent, Omnipresent, All-wise Being who is all love and 
goodness to His creatures ; — if there are, as doubtless there 
are, many such who thus stand in a state of doubt and un- 
certainty respecting the Holy Scriptures, and the working 
wisdom of Divine love, then it may be truly said that to 
such is the word of this revelation sent." l 

For as William Law says, "There is not any philosophical 
question that can be put, nor advice nor direction that can 
be asked in regard to God, or Nature, or Christianity, but 
what Boehme has over and over spoke to, and that in the 
plainest terms." A saying that needs this qualification — 
The plainest terms in which subjects of such mystery can 
be spoken of. As his translator, John Sparrow, quaintly 
reminds us in his Introduction to Boehme's Mysterium Mag- 
num — "Mysteries cannot be expressed in easy words; 
some things most excellent cannot be uttered by any words 
[ Romans viii. v. 26 ], therefore 'tis happy some other hard 
things may be uttered [ 2 Cor. xii. v. 4 ] though by hard 
words, better than none at all." 

"The chief cause," says Dionysius Freher, Boehme's 
great interpreter, "of all these suspicions which we many 
of us cast upon this chosen vessel of God, Jacob Boehme, 
1 C. Walton's Memorial of IV. Law, page 82. 



Jacob Boehme 15 

is that we can so hardly elevate our thoughts above the 
sphere of this temporal principle and the forms and course 
of things that are therein, and always think that our ap- 
prehension of things in their present condition is a true 
measuring line, fit to measure the same things exactly as 
they were before they came into this fragmentary state." — 
[D. Freher on Deity and Eternal Nature.] 

Before specifying the peculiar knowledge to be gained 
from his teaching, I will cite the testimony of some of 
Boehme's most distinguished students, and then his own, 
as to the worth and the source of his revelations. 

Edward Taylor, writing about the year 1678 an answer to 
one of the 170 Theosophic Questions proposed by Boehme, 
said : — "Whereas men have dark, confused notions of God, 
like those of Athens dedicating their altars to the unknown 
God ; of Him, therefore, whom men ignorantly worship do 
J. Boehme's writings give a clear, certain, demonstrable, 
and distinct knowledge, and of all things and worlds ; also 
of all creatures, from the most holy, angelical Princes of 
Eternity to the most despicable excrescence of time." 

J. G. Gichtel, advising a friend in the year 1698, said : — 
"I have searched through many mystics in my time, but 
found in none of these what, with great labour, prayer, 
striving and wrestling through many years, I have found 
in this enlightened shoemaker ; and I can never sufficiently 
thank God for His grace who thereby enlightened me in 
many perplexities, and solved such desperate dilemmas as 
met me in the strife with the dragon. And I may with 
good ground affirm, that if there is in Scripture anything 
obscure, magical, or mystical, Boehme solves it all ; and I 
wish with all my heart that you may find your peace there- 
in." — [Theosophica Practica, vol. 1, letter 88.] 

Speaking of him in the first year of the present century, 
Poiret said : — "j. Boehme est le seul, au moins dont on ait 
les ecrits jusqua lui, (anquel Dieu ait deconver tie fond de la 
Nature, tant des choses spirituelles que des corporelles ; et 



1 6 Jacob Boehme 

qui avec une penetration toute centrale des choses theo- 
logiques et surnaturelles, ait aussi connu d'origine les vrais 
principes de la philosophic tant de la metaphysique, que de 
la vrai physique." 1 

Writing to a friend in 1792, L. Claud de St. Martin told 
him "Je ne suis pas jeune etanttout pres de ma cinquantieme 
annee ; est c'est a cette age avance que jai commence a 
apprendre le peu d'Allemand que je possede, uniquement 
pour lire cet incomparable auteur." . . . "Je neconnais 
n'etre pas digne de denouer les cordons des souliers de cet 
homme etonnant que je regarde comme la plus grande 
lumiere qui ait paru sur la terre apres Celui qui est la 
lumiere meme." . . . "Je vous exhorte, si vous avez 
le temps a vous jeter dans cet abime de connaissances et de 
profondes verites." . . . "Dans J. Boehme je trouve 
une aplomb d'une solidite inebranlable ; j'y trouve une pro- 
fondens, une elevation, une nouriture si pleine et si soutenne 
que je vous avoue, que je croirais perdre mon temps que de 
chercher ailleurs." * — Lettres a Kirchberger, 

Speaking of Schelling's works, Schopenhauer, still more 
recently said, " Es ist fast nur eine Umarbeitung von Jacob 
Boehme's Mysterium Magnum, in welchem sich fast jeder 
Satz und jeder ausdruck nachweisen lasst. Warum aber 

1 Translation. — "J. Boehme is the only one, at least whose writings we 
have until his time, to whom God has discovered the basis of Nature, in 
spiritual as well as in corporeal things, and who, with a central penetration in 
theological and supernatural matters, has also known from their origin the true 
principles of philosophy in metaphysics as well as in true physics." 

2 Translation. — "I am no longer young, being near my fiftieth year ; and 
at this advanced age I have begun to learn the little German I know, solely to 
read this incomparable author." . . "I frankly acknowledge that I am not 
worthy to untie the shoestrings of that wonderful man, whom I look upon as 
the greatest light that has appeared on the earth since Him who is the light 
Himself." . . . "I exhort you, if you have time, to dive into this abyss 
of knowledge and profound truths." . . . "In Boehme I find a solidity 
that cannot be shaken ; a depth, an elevation and a nourishment so full and 
so unfailing, that I confess I should think it time lost to seek elsewhere." — 
Letters 2 and 8 of St. Martin to Kirchberger. 



Jacob Boehme 17 

sind mir bei Schelling die selben Bilder, Formen, und 
ausdrucke unertraglich und lacherlich, die ich bei Jacob 
Boehme mit Bewundrung und Riihrung lese ? Weil ich 
erkenne dass in Boehme die Erkenntniss der Ewigen 
Wahrheit es ist die sich in diesen Bilden auspricht, obwohl 
sie auch mit gleichen Fug in vielen anderen sich hatte 
ausprechen konnen. Schelling aber nimmt von ihm was 
er allein nehmen kann, die selbe Bilder und ausdrucke, halt 
ein Schale fur die Frucht, oder weiss sie wenigstens nicht 
von die Frucht zu losen." 1 — A. Schopenhauer's Hand- 
schriftlich Nachlass, page 261. 

D. Freher, of whom it is recorded that he "read all 
Boehme's books in the original more than ten times through, 
though not without the greatest disgust imaginable in the be- 
ginning, gave this testimony among many others of greater 
length : "As to Boehme, it is with me, and I am sure with 
many others also, beyond all doubt and question that he 
verily had a true and deep understanding, not in his reason, 
but in his central spirit, of the manner and process of the 
whole creation ; nay, that he really and fundamentally un- 
derstood even the way and method of the necromancy it- 
self, not in practice as the devil's agents do, but in the 
ground and depth thereof, wherein they are blind and igno- 
rant." — [C. Walton's Memorial of W. Law, page 465.] 

And only a few years ago Mr. E. Paxton Hood in his 
Essay on "Boehme, the Evangelical Hegel, 1 ' sums up his 
peculiar value thus: "To those who would know how 
much is to be said to the reason and the understanding to 

1 Free Translation. — "It is almost only a revived make up of Jacob 
Boehme's Mysterium Magnum, to which its every sentiment and every ex- 
pression leads one to recur. But why in Schelling are the same images, forms, 
and phrases unbearable and absurd, which in Jacob Boehme I read with ad- 
miration and emotion ? Because in Boehme I recognise the perception of 
Eternal truth which expresses itself in these images, though it might have 
done so with equal propriety in many others. But Schelling takes from him 
what only he could take ; holds the husk for the fruit, or at least does not 
know how to separate it from the fruit." 



1 8 Jacob Boehme 

strengthen and confirm the faith, to keep the frail spirit of 
the thoughtful man from reeling from its steadfastness, or 
plunging into an ocean or night of despair, the works of 
Boehme are full to overflowing of light and strength." 

Evidence equally strong might be adduced from other 
writers, such, for instance, as Oetinger and Hamberger, 
both German exponents of his teaching, but what has been 
given already will suffice to convince any one who intends 
to study his works, that there must be very solid ground 
for such exceptional value being attributed to them. I 
well know the incredulity with which modern students 
hear or read such praise of writings which have been be- 
fore the world for more than two centuries and have yet 
been little read : the natural assumption is that if they were 
really all their admirers say, they must have taken higher 
rank in literary estimation. 

This, however true as regards books of more external 
interest, is never true of those which claim concentrated 
attention for a world to which the majority, even of stu- 
dents, remain indifferent, until introduced to it by Death — 
that inner world where the spirit acts with spirits — into 
which few of us care to look till driven by pain or grief 
from the louder and coarser excitements of outer interests. 
And it needs but little observation of English character to 
convince us that to average men and women such writings 
as Boehme's must be at first distasteful. [When English 
readers can call a book mystical they have usually sealed it, 
virtually, for themselves and for all whom they can influence, 
as unreadable.] Some, like the late Mr. Vaughan, may 
take up a volume of his as an historic curiosity, and pass 
judgment upon it with lively decision, quite unconscious 
of having failed to perceive its scope. In his Hours with 
the Mystics, the only point which that excellent man made 
good when professing to deal with Boehme's writings, is 
that to criticise them without right comprehension of their 
contents is to ensure self-exposure. Since that book was 



Jacob Boehme 19 

published, twenty-eight years ago, time and enlarged in- 
telligence have modified literary fashions, and the incoming 
tide of interest in occult studies has placed him far higher 
in the esteem of learned men than people in the first half 
of this century would have expected, but at no period could 
his books be read without arousing the instinctive antag- 
onisms between prophet and priest, and the dislike of 
those who rely on doctrines that have been long fixed, and 
which they therefore regard as authoritative and final, for 
people who accept direct instruction from the unseen world, 
and look for ever-widening views of truth. Add to this 
invincible suspicion of the unfixtd in religious matters, re- 
sentment as inevitable under the censures of the innovator ! 
When in the late Mr. C. Walton's Memorial of W. Law, 1 
we read that Boehme was "a discoverer of the false anti- 
Christian Church from its first rise in Cain, through every 
age of the world, to its present state in all and every sect of 
the present divided Christendom" (page 86), enough is said 
to account for clerical feeling about him. Each division of 
Christendom's Church may bewail what is anti-Christian in 
others, but to see so clearly mirrored the special errors and 
self-delusions of every sect, inclusive of one's own, and to 
find those besetting evils denounced with all the force of 
justice — this is what few can stand without making a 
counter-charge of fanaticism to invalidate his verdict. And 
this has been so successfully made, that condemning Boehme 
as a very "mischievous writer," without opening one of 
his books, has been as usual as it is convenient for the 
purpose of discrediting them. So it was in his life-time. 
" The citizens here about me knew nothing of my writing ." 
. . . "It was proclaimed among them for heresy, 
which notwithstanding they never read^ neither was it ex- 
amined ever as it was meet." — [ Epistle 3, par. 19. ] 

The invariable complaint as to the obscurity of style — on 
which account so many excuse themselves from heeding 

1 Unpublished, but to be found in most of England's large Public Libraries. 



20 Jacob Boehme 

what is only too plain on themes distasteful to self-love — will 
hardly be raised as an objection by any one who has just 
ideas of the teaching he had to deliver. It was such as his 
own mind had been in no way prepared for, beyond an in- 
tense longing for Divine grace, and total passivity under its 
influence. "I speak," he says, " not of and from myself, 
but from that which the Spirit showeth, which no man can 
resist." — [Epistle 3, par. 38.] "I declare in the presence 
of God, as I shall answer it before His judgment, where all 
things shall appear, and every one shall give an account of 
his deeds, that I myself know not how it comes to pass 
with me, save only that I have a fiery incitement, or strong 
driving and instigation in my will. I know not also what 
I shall write, for when I write the Spirit dictates to me in 
great and wonderful knowledge." . . . " I am, verily, 
a simple man, and have neither learned, nor after this man- 
ner sought after, this high mystery, nor knew I anything 
of it : I only sought the heart of love in Jesus Christ, and 
when I had obtained that with great joy of my soul, then 
was this treasure of natural and Divine knowledge opened 
and given unto me." — [A Warning from J. Boehme, pars. 
14 and 16. ] 

Also, as W. Law observes, ''What he saw and conceived 
was quite new and strange, never seen or spoken of be- 
fore, and, therefore, if he was to put it down in writing, 
words must be used to signify that which they had never 
done before." — [Lazv's Letters.] And as his translator, 
John Sparrow, says there is this advantage in phraseology 
so unusual and uncouth, "that those excellent notions 
which he layeth down might not be slipped over as men 
do common current English, but that the strangeness of 
the words may make them a little stay and consider what 
the meaning of them may be." * — [ Preface to J. B.'s Three 
Principles. ] 

1 "Truths must be barbed and hooked to cling to us in their passage 
through the mind : to make them smooth and easy is only to facilitate their 
escape." — Sewell on The Cultivation of the Intellect. 



Jacob Boehme 21 

He is surely right as to that ; readers too often believe 
themselves in possession of an author's meaning only be- 
cause every word used is intelligible. But how could lan- 
guage, however clear, make such themes as Boehme's im- 
mediately intelligible to any mind ? He gives a summary 
of a few of them thus, in answer to his accuser, Ttlken. 
" Learn first to understand the Centre of the Eternal Nature, 
and how to distinguish the clear or bright Deity from 
Nature ; and learn how the Deity revealeth itself through 
Nature, and learn what God's Wisdom is, how it is the out- 
spoken substance of the Deity, and what the Divine Life is, 
and then what Nature Life is." . . . "Also what Par- 
adise and Heaven are, what Evil and Good." — \ Apology 2, 
part 1, par. 34. ] 

Truly so soon as we see the least glint of light in the 
depths of knowledge he opens, we assent to his old trans- 
lator's quaint confession, " Ail that I apprehend not is not 
nonsense, though I may think so." 

A graver objection to the worth of Boehme's revelations 
is, that the fact of being a medium in no way guarantees 
the validity of the message thus transmitted to us. A clear 
perception of this, which we owe to the experience of 
Spiritists ( however much we may disapprove of their prac- 
tice) might have saved past generations from many a fever 
of fanaticism, due indeed to inspiration, but not that of the 
Spirit of Truth ; now the credentials of this messenger are 
not only his deep humility and freedom from ajl self- 
assertion, but the perfect harmony of his teaching with that 
of Holy Writ. Not that it is restricted to what we learn 
from our Bible, but that it is never in opposition, and great- 
ly elucidates parts of it, which without his further revelation 
has been, and ever must be, a stumbling-stone to every 
reader whose faith depends mainly upon a reasonable un- 
derstanding of Scripture. These elucidations of his shall be 
briefly noticed farther on. 

Moreover, we find evidence of his veracity as heaven- 



22 Jacob Boehme 

sent, in the forcible simpleness of his style ; his words fit 
the windings of human nature in its innermost resorts as 
perfectly as old Bible words ; and before we have time to 
scrutinise the justice of his verdict, both heart and head feel 
its accuracy, and flinch from it or accept it, as the case may 
be. 

" As a chosen servant of God," said W. Law, "J. Boehme 
may be placed among those who had received the highest 
measures of light, wisdom, and knowledge from above. 
He has no right to be placed among the inspired penmen of 
the New Testament ; he was no messenger from God of 
anything new in religion, but the mystery of all that was 
old and true in religion and Nature was opened in him. 
This is the peculiarity of his character, by which he stands 
fully distinguished from all the prophets, apostles, and ex- 
traordinary messengers of God. They were sent on oc- 
casional messages, or to make such alterations in the cere- 
mony of religion as pleased God ; but this man came on no 
particular errand, he had nothing to alter or add either in 
the form or doctrine of religion. He had no new truths of 
religion to propose, but all that lay in religion and Nature 
as a mystery unsearchable, was in its deepest ground opened 
to this instrument of God." — [Animadversions upon Dr. 
Traps Reply, vol. 6 of W. Law's Works, p. 32}.] 

He was himself quite aware both of the nature of the 
communications made through him, and of their exception- 
al value. After describing the process of his own enlight- 
enment, he added : "I exhort and entreat you, for the 
eternal salvation sake, to heed and mind well the Pearl that 
God favoureth us with, for there will come a time that it 
shall be sought after and greatly accepted of." . . . 
"Look upon it aright, and pray God the Most High, that 
He would be pleased to open the door of knowledge, with- 
out which no man will understand my writings, for they 
surpass the astral reason." — [Letter 16, par. 8.] 

And again, speaking of the time of the end, when 



Jacob Boebme 23 

"Babel burneth up in the anger of God," . . "at that 
time my writing shall be very serviceable." — [ Letter 26, par. 

16.] 

Let his use of the pronoun we be noticed. Thus he ex- 
plained it : — " I give you to understand that in these writ- 
ings the author useth sometimes to speak of himself we and 
sometimes I. Now understand by the word we, the spirit 
(being spoken in the plural) in two persons, and in the 
word/, the author understands himself." — [Letter 3, par. 

.59.] 

"My revelation reacheth even into the three kingdoms 
like an angelical knowledge ; but not in my reason or ap- 
prehension, or in perfection like an angel, but in part, and 
so long only as the spirit tarrieth in me. Further I know 
it not. When he parteth from me I know nothing but the 
elementary and earthly things of this world." — [Aurora, 
chap. 7, pars. 17 to 20.] 

But this he wrote in his earliest book. At a later date 
what knowledge had come to him by "the impulse and 
motion of God," was sufficiently assimilated for transmis- 
sion through his own understanding in some degree ; yet at 
no period did he arrogate to himself any knowledge of 
transcendental truth. He speaks of it as " What God knew 
in him." A profound suggestion this of the relation that 
all divine knowledge bears to the human intellect. It was 
by virtue of this relation that he justified what the critics 
of his day, as well as ours, have censured for being a pre- 
sumptuous search into themes too high for human thought. 
" Mockers and despisers who would say it doth not become 
me to climb so high into the Deity, and to dive so deeply 
thereinto. To all of them I give this for an answer, that I 
am not climbed up into the Deity, neither is it possible for 
such a mean man as I am to do it, but the Deity is climbed 
up into me, and from its love are these things revealed un- 
to me." — [Aurora 18, pars. 8 and 10.] "The Holy Ghost 
in the soul is creaturely, viz., the propriety or portion of the 



24 Jacob Boehme 

soul ; therefore it searcheth even unto the Deity, and also 
into Nature for it hath its source and descent from the Being 
of the whole Deity." — [Preface to Aurora, par. 22.] 

He in his turn reproaches ministers of the Gospel with 
their unprogressiveness in the knowledge of spiritual facts, 
and complains of the insufficiency of authorised theology 
to satisfy the deepest needs of the soul. "If," he says, "a 
man would satisfy the human mind so that it may give it- 
self up into the Eternal rest, then a man must show him the 
root of the tree out of which spirit and flesh hath its original ; 
a man must show and open to him the centre of the Eternal, 
as also of the beginning Nature, that he may apprehend the 
earthly and also the heavenly mystery. And then is the 
Eternal beginning and the Eternal end totally one, wherein 
the spirit of the soul Iayeth itself into rest, for it seeth the 
wheel totally." — [Considerations of E. Stiefel's Threefold 
Life, par. 2}.] 1 

If the depth of that rest was known, and the continuous 
delightful activity of gain to the mind which that rest ad- 
mits one to, even in the midst of the confusing discords of 
modern thought, access to that rest would be sought for as 
life's chief good. But, like the all-satisfying rewards of 
fairy-tale heroes, it can only be approached by toil, self- 
abnegation, and child-like docility ; without these it will 
never be won. 

It remains to specify the nature of some of those revela- 
tions with which Boehme offers to satisfy the mind which 
"doth not leave off searching till it comes to the innermost 
ground. But if it reach not the ground, it sinketh down in 
the ground, and cannot apprehend it, and then cometh 
doubting, unbelief, and contempt into the mind." — [Three- 
fold Life, par. 60, chap. 4.] [To how many are these come 
for want of any help towards reaching the innermost 
ground ! ] 

Perhaps the greatest of all truths to be won from his 

1 See also Three Principles, chap. 3, pars. 4 and 5. 



Jacob Boehme 25 

pages is that all evil, sin, and misery, while contrary to and 
in every sense repugnant to the love of God, are neverthe- 
less consonant with arrested evolution of the Eternal Nature 
of God in Man ; for he proves that there is a Nature in the 
Eternal life, and that, apart from that Nature, i.e., the in- 
teraction of the Seven Spirits of God {forms to Nature in 
his translated phraseology) , the abyssal Deity could not be 
known nor any creaturely life exist. —[See his treatise on 
The Incarnation, Part I., Chap. 13, par. 68.] 

It would take a small volume to explain this central truth, 
and the student must work it out from Boehme's own 
words, bearing in mind the undeniable truth that if "we 
live and move and have our being in God," there can be 
nothing in us or in our world which did not primarily 
originate in Divine Nature ; but this very word Nature, a 
becoming, indicates first the absence of absolute unalterable 
finality, and the door by which contraries might enter ; 
what is coming to be may, on the lower plane of creaturely 
life, degenerate or fall short of due evolution. The power 
of Evil, with all its subtlety and skill, is, and has been, and 
ever will be, a dismaying fact to account for in a world 
brought into existence by an Omniscient, Infinite Love and 
Wisdom ; but if once we apprehend Boehme's doctrine of 
the difference of God unmanifest, apart from Creation, and 
manifested by His Eternal Nature, i.e., the ceaseless action 
of the Seven Spirits of God, it becomes intelligible that all 
which obstructs their original harmony of action in Nature 
and Creature will produce evil, which is not done by God, 
the only Good, and yet is done by misuse of forces derived 
from Him ; that "falling short of the glory of God" (which 
I am convinced is an equivalent term for perfected action of 
the six forms of Eternal Nature in the seventh — the heavenly 
substantiality ) is in the highest sense an arrest of evolution ; 
the creature destined to find bliss by manifesting the infinite 
virtues and glories of Abyssal Deity, seeking it in self, works 
for other and lower objects ; the fallen angels for self-exal- 



26 Jacob Boehme 

tation ; human beings to gratify desires which debased 
what they once were, to mortal life as we know it. 

Now, ideas such as these call for considerable modifica- 
tion of all that were previously held as regards creation. 
Theology has used us to thinking of this as a work per- 
formed by Divine Fiat, irrespective of the will of the creat- 
ure ; and we talk of the formation of all the worlds and 
their various inhabitants, as if they were made and set in 
motion by the immediate will of the One Omnipotent God. 
"Men lead us on," Boehme says, "in vain images of the 
essential will, as if the only God did will this or that ; 
whereas Himself is the sole will to the being of Nature and 
Creature, and the whole Creation lieth only and alone in 
the formation of His expressed word and will, and the sev- 
er atton of the only will in the expression." — [Mysterium 
Magnum., chap. 60, par. 41. ] 

An idea he utters with blunter force in his profoundly in- 
structive treatise on "The Election of Grace," — "Never 
dispute about the will of God. We ourselves are God's 
will to evil and good : which of them soever is manifested 
in us, we are that, whether it be Hell or Heaven." — [Chap. 
8, par. 288.] 

[ A saying which it is very important to guard by the 
addition, " Will of God's Eternal Nature in us." ] 

He makes us understand that every Spirit forms its own 
body by its own will and desire, that one being separates 
itself from the will and life and creative word of another, in 
countless gradations of existence derived from the one 
source of all being to the lowest form of creaturely life. 
And that thus all things are made by the Word of God, in 
the transmitted potentialities of life ; that thus the desire of 
God, to manifest the unsearchable infinitude of Deific 
powers and glories, brought into being all that exists, and 
is still bringing forth. " Thus now, unto this very day, all 
things are yet in the fiat or creating, and the Creation hath 
no end until the judgment of God." — {Three Principles, 
chap. 2}, par. 20.] 



Jacob Boehme 27 

This identification of the will of the Word of God with 
the will of the creature in the soul of man, is perhaps the 
most difficult part of his teaching to explain ; and his own 
words must be cited in the attempt. But no amount of 
quotation can give an adequate glimpse of the light which 
streams from his works on Election, and on Divine Vision, 
when long and patiently studied. 

" The living Word of God, which is God Himself," . 
. . " speaketh itself through Nature forth into a Spirit of 
the World, as a soul of the Creation." — [Election, chap. 5, 
par. 47.1 

" Every power has an emanation according to the right 
of Nature in the speaking Word." — [Ibid, chap. 4, .par. 

45-] 

"The Word of God, viz., the Speaking Word, was in all 
properties in Spiritu Mundi, and in the Ens or being of the 
Earth, stirring up out of the Spirit of the World ; and spoke 
or breathed forth a life into every being ; viz., the Fiat, or 
creating power, which is the desire of the Word." — [ Ibid, 
pars. 88 and 89.] 

"Everything's centre as a piece of the outspoken Word 
re-outspeaketh itself, and compriseth or frameth itself into 
separability after the kind and manner of the Divine speak- 
ing, and so now if in this outspeaking there were no free 
will, then the speaking would have a law, and would be 
under compulsion or subjection, and no desire or longing 
delight might exist. And then the speaking were finite, 
which it is not. But it is a breathing of the Abyss." J — [ On 
the Knowledge of All Things, pars. 11 and 12.] 

And so "every centre maketh its own out-breathing, 
Nature, and Substance, out of itself, and yet all originateth 
out of the Eternal One." — [Ibid, par. 19.] 

1 Let believers in Evolution note this. How infinite must be progression 
from the Abyss of all Being ! See on this theme Professor H. Drummond's 
admirable chapter on " Classification/' in his book on " Natural Law in the 
Supernatural IVorld." 



28 Jacob Boehme 

Now, it is only thus that "in divisibility God willeth 
good and evil/' — [ Election, chap. 6, par. 81.] But " with- 
out Nature and Creature He is the greatest meekness and 
humility, wherein is no way, footsteps or prints possibly 
either of any will to good or evil inclination ; for there is 
neither good nor evil before Him. He is Himself the Eter- 
nal only Good." — [ Election, chap, i, par. 57.] But, as we 
find in Scripture, "with the holy thou art holy, and with 
the perverse thou art perverse." . . . "For in the 
thrones of the holy angels God is manifest in His love, and 
in the thrones of the devils He is manifest in His wrath, 
viz., according to the darkness and torment ; and yet there 
is but one only God, and not two. According to the tor- 
mentative Nature He willeth torment, and according to the 
love He willeth love ; as a burning fire desireth hard brim- 
stone like itself, and the light desireth only an open place 
where it may shine. It taketh nothing away, but giveth 
itself for the joy of life ; it suffereth itself to be taken ; it 
hath no other will in itself, but to give forth itself and work." 
— [Mysterium Magnum, chap. 60, par. 46.] 

I venture to affirm that these great truths firmly grasped, 
of clear distinction between God in total and in partial 
manifestation, and of man's freedom to generate the first 
tormenting forms of Divine Nature, or their full circle of 
blissful harmony, would relieve us of the darkest suspicions 
that weigh more or less on every thoughful mind, and 
would give us a key to many mysteries which have utterly 
baffled human intelligence hitherto. The every-day won- 
der which meets us on all sides — if once reflection goes be- 
yond the surface — is that life is just what we make it in the 
inner world, and consequently largely modified in external 
life by our own self-admitted fatalities. 

From the Bible we learn how peculiarly man's existence 
was a desire of the Supreme mind : " Let us make man in 
our image." And Boehme explains, as I believe no one 
else ever has, why and how the reformation of regenerate 



Jacob Boehme 29 

man must exactly correspond with the origin of the first 
Adam, and how wholly worthless is any more superficial 
reformation as regards Eternal life. 

1 must be pardoned if on this point also 1 adduce his own 
testimony. 

"The life of man," he says [Divine Vision, chap. 2, par. 
2], "is a form of the Divine will, and is come from the 
inbreathing into the created image of man " (i.e., what the 
world-soul had built up by derived agencies in gradual evo- 
lution, the breath of God animated) , but that "life's will 
hath imaged itself with the outward representation of the 
mortal nature." .... "The inward Divine ground 
of the goodwill and substance extinguished, that is as to 
the creature, became worthless, for the will of the life 
brake itself off therefrom and went out of the unity into 
the multiplicity." — [Ibid, pars. 2, 6, and 7.] "It turned 
itself from the speaking of the Word into a peculiar self- 
willing, and speaking in good and evil, that is, into its own 
lust and contrived imagination ; then the first good will in 
the creature to the re-expressing did perish, and now he 
must enter again into the first speaking Word, and speak 
with God, or he is eternally without God." — [ Epistle 7, par. 

"In which re-outspeaking the new regeneration of the 
human life and will is understood. For the human life was 
in the beginning of man in the Word of God, and by the 
inbreathing of the Word into the human body was mani- 
fested and came into sensibility, perceptibility and willing. 
Where, then, the willing hath broken itself off from the 
Word wherein the life was tvithout creature, and hath 
brought itself into a self-separability and visibility, and 
perceptibility of the five senses. In which sensibility it 
now runneth, and seeketh the seat of God therein, but 
findeth only a measureableness and natural and creaturely 
formedness ; wherein now it striveth about its own centre. 
For the own will hath brought itself into an own centre 



30 Jacob Boebme 

and broken itself off from the whole, and, as to the total, is 
as it were dead." — [Baptism, chap, i, par. 8. ] 

[ The context, too long for quotation, is most valuable 
for learning on this recondite ground. ] Now the great 
secret which Boehme incessantly presses upon our belief is, 
that to attain this lost power of being the mouthpiece of 
God, "man must seek and call upon the Holy Spirit in him- 
self ; for in himself is the place where God dwelleth in His 
heaven, and taketh in the soul's will with its desire." — 
[ Considerations on E. Stiefel's Threefold Life, par. 1 16 and 
onward. ] 

"The right way into the Eternal life is in man ; he hath 
introduced the soul's will into the outward world, and that 
(the soul's will) he must introduce into the inward world." 
— [Ibid, par. 134. ] And this presupposes mortification of 
the will that lusts for outward good. Without this death 
to the will of corrupt humanity the new birth cannot be. 
If the Spirit "diethto its selfhood and breaketh its will, 
then a new twig springeth forth out of the same, but not 
according to the first will, but according to the Eternal will ; 
for if a thing entereth into its Nothing, then it falleth again 
to the Creator, who maketh that thing as it was known in 
the Eternal will before it was created to be a creature." — 
[Signatura Rerum, chap. 15, par. 46. ] 

( But with all the spoils of experience, and all the powers 
of raising other fallen souls added to it. ) 

"When a man yields himself wholly to God, then his 
will falls again into the unsearchable will of God, out of 
which he came in the beginning," . . . "for if the 
creature willeth no more than what God willeth through it, 
then it is dead to itself, and standeth again in the first 
image, viz. — in that wherein God formed it into a life. For 
what is the life of a creature ? Nothing else but a spark of 
the will of God, which creature now standeth still to the 
will of God," . . . "then nothing can torment it 
more ; its willing is its own life, and whatsoever willeth in 



Jacob Boehme 31 

and with God, that is one life with God. "— [ Mysterium 
Magnum, chap. 66, pars. 64 and 65. ] 

And so the soul ''falls again into the Word wherein it 
stood in the Eternal speaking." — [Ibid. 60, par. 34.] 

Thus Boehme harmonises the paradoxical sayings of St. 
Paul, that man is to "workout his own salvation," and 
" that it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, 
but of God that showeth mercy." The great and anxious 
work that man has to accomplish is the breaking of his own 
will. " A true Christian forceth against the self-ful lusts of 
selfhood, and willeth continually so to do ; and yet is many 
times hindered by selfhood ; he breaketh selfhood as a 
vessel wherein he lieth captive." — [ Sig. Re., chap. 15, par. 
51.] "If the soulish abyssal will yieldeth, applieth, or 
uniteth itself to the Spirit of Christ in the inward ground, 
then Christ taketh hold of it, and draweth it up into Him- 
self, and therein the ability existeth that it can do this." — 
[Election, chap. 8, par. 160. ] 

It is only thus that man becomes "an instrument in the 
voice of God, upon which only the will spirit of God doth 
strike to its honour and deeds of wonder ; " for so he is 
"born from within, out of the speaking yoice of God in 
God's will spirit." — [Signatura Rerum, chap. 15, pars. 20 
and 22.] 

" It is not said that they can take the grace, but that they 
should sink down into the grace, that grace may give itself 
to them, for man's ability to take it is lost ; self-will is rent 
off from God, it must wholly sink down into God, and 
leave off willing, that God may receive it again into his 
grace." — [Mysterium Magnum, chap. 69, par. 18. See also, 
Incarnation, part 2, chap. 9, pars. 26, 27. ] 

Even to the soul most deeply stained with sin this ability 
remains. " He cannot convert himself, yet his soul has 
might and power from its very original, out of the eternal 
root of the Abyss, to throw himself into the Abyss, into the 
ground wherein God generates and speaks his Word. In 



32 Jacob Boehme 

which abyss of the creature the free gift of the bestowed 
grace lies in all men, and sooner inclineth itself towards the 
soul, than the soul doth this towards this deep grace." . 

. . "If any will say it cannot demerse itself into the 
Abyss, he speaks as one that understands nothing of the 
mysteries of God, concerning what a soul is, and what an 
angel is, and will needs break off the twig from the tree 
wherein the twig standeth. The soul is spoken out of the 
Abyss into a creature ; who will break or interrupt the 
right of Eternity, so that the Eternal will of the soul, which 
is come into a creature out of the One only Eternal will, 
should not dare to demerse itself with that same will of the 
creature into its mother again, out of which it proceeded ? 
Into the light which is extinguished in it, it cannot demerse 
itself in its own ability ; but into the cause of the light, 
wherein there is neither Evil nor Good, it can demerse it- 
self ; for itself is the ground. Now, therefore, if it demerse 
itself and fall down from its own imagination in itself, on 
to the Abyss, then it is there already. And in this Abyss 
lies its Pearl." — [Election, chap, u, pars. 139 to 146.] 

This is not only one of the most practically important, 
but one of the clearest depths of Boehme's teaching, or I 
should not venture to enter upon it so largely. As a rule, 
Boehme alone can expound his own words. The Quietists 
practically understood this advice as to sinking down ; no 
one will ever try it, I believe, in total surrender of every 
grasping wish, and every anxious desire, without knowing 
that in the ground of the soul, man has access to the peace 
of God. 

According to Boehme, the soul in its likeness to the 
Triune Deity must generate the light, and through the light, 
"the Spirit which becometh generated out of the soul's 
fire, out of God's meekness, and substance, that is also the 
Holy Spirit ; it dwelleth in the Divine property, and taketh 
its seeing out of the Divine property." — [Incarnation , part 
2, chap. 7, par. 27.] " Man in respect of his external com- 



Jacob Boehme }} 

prehensible or finite body standeth only in a flitting figura- 
tive shadow or resemblance, and with his spiritual body 
he is the true essential Word of the Divine property, in 
which God speaketh and begetteth his Word, and there the 
Divine Science doth distribute, impart, impress, form and 
beget itself to an image of God." — [Epistle 6, par. 41. See 
Way from Darkness to True Illumination, page 264.] 

This last assertion may, at first reading, seem almost 
profane in its boldness. In his pages it has no such ap- 
pearance, because he so unfailingly and reverently distin- 
guishes between man as he is, without this new birth, and 
with it, claiming for regenerate man — when come to full 
stature in Christ — no more than did the Apostles, when 
Peter wrote of his fellow-Christians as being " partakers of 
the Divine Nature," and Paul, " He that is joined unto the 
Lord is one spirit." 

Even as regards regenerate man, Boehme is most precise 
in guarding against the common error of fanatics. "The 
creature," he said in his 3rd Apology — [ 1st point, 4th text, 
par. 6) ] — " is not God ; it remaineth eternally under God, 
but God blazeth through it with His light and shining, and 
that very light, the soul, viz., the man, retaineth so long 
for its own as the will remaineth in God's light." 

Fully recognising the original greatness of man, thanking 
God that his mind is indeed a beam of His omnipotence, 
glory, and skilfulness, . . . "a figure of the great 
name of God" — [Prayer for Midday, par. 126] — he yet 
never exalts the human soul apart from its mediumistic 
office, regarding it solely as a basis for Divine action, 
created for the manifestation of God, and — failing in this — 
a monster — an abortion. Hence his urgency of counsel to 
annihilate the selfhood, to bring himself "into the One, 
viz., into God's will," . . . " and leave himself wholly 
in God's mercy, and bring all his learnings into this one 
only thing, that he in his teachings and learnings will not 
do or speak anything but what God willeth through him ; 



34 Jacob Boehme 

and thus all opinions and conceits do die in him, and the 
soul's life falleth into the only living Word, which hath 
manifested itself again in the humanity." — [Mysterium 
Magnum, chap. 36, par. 50.] 

So entirely does he recognise that man's only power is 
recipiency of Divine influx, that whereas other teachers 
speak of what we know, he affirms that all true spiritual 
knowledge is what God knows in us. " God's spirit," he 
says, "must become the knowing in us." — [Apology 2, 
part 1, par. 54.] And again, "I know not myself, but 
God's spirit knoweth itself in me ; He allures me therewith 
to Himself, and when he departeth then I know nothing." 
[ Apology 1, part 2, par. 587. ] 

It is remarkable that this, one of his capital doctrines, in 
no way infringes upon the prerogative of free will, or up- 
on the claims of every-day duty, as regards cultivating our 
talents, to the uttermost of our ability, for service, for serv- 
ing to God's purposes — a distinction St. Martin has well 
pointed out, since the instrument cannot actively serve the 
agent. 1 

For those who question the free will of man, Boehme 
has the ever-recurring argument ( conclusive as he deemed 
it) that as a direct emanation from the source of all being, 
he must have it. He tells us that the mind of man is an- 
terior to every source of the properties of Nature, and 
therefore to every quality due to temperament or astral in- 
fluence : "for the fire-soul is a root proceeded out of the 
Divine omnipotence, and therefore it hath free will, and 
nothing can deprive it thereof ; it may conceive either in 
the fire or light." — [Mysterium Magnum, chap. 26, par. 7.] 

"The centre of the mind is come out of Eternity, out of 
God's omnipotence ; it can bring itself into what it will and 
whither it will." — [ True Resignation, chap. 3, par. 20.] 

1 "J'entends souvent parler dans le monde de servir Dieu ; mais je n'y 
entends guere parler de servir a Dieu, car il en est bien peu qui sachent ce 
que c'estque cet emploi-la." — [CEuvres Posthumes de St. Martin. ] 



Jacob Boehme 35 

And so far from counselling to any ascetic withdrawal 
from the occupations of this present life, he regards a dili- 
gent development of every faculty, of all skill and art as a 
main object of man's existence. "God hath given to man 
to seek and to reveal or manifest the wonders of God in 
this world's substance to his, viz., man's own joy, delight, 
and longing pleasure, that God might be praised, known, 
and acknowledged in all works, substances, and things." — 
[Apology 3, text 4, par. 88.] 

"Man is, therefore, become created in this world as a 
wise ruler or manager thereof, that he should open all 
wonders, which were from Eternity," . . . "and ac- 
cording to his willing bring them into forms, figures, and 
images, all to his joy and glory." — [3rd part of Incarnation, 
chap. 6, par. 31. See also on this subject Three Principles, 
chap. 20, par. 10, and Threefold Life, chap. 17, par. 12.] 

"The deeper a man is learned concerning God, the deep- 
er he seeketh, and seeth into God's deeds of wonder in Art ; 
for all profitable arts are revealed out of God's Wisdom ; 
not that they are that by which man cometh to God, but 
for the government of the outward life, and for the glorious 
manifestation of the Divine Wisdom and Omnipotence." — 
[ Apology 3, text 4, par. 77. See also Incarnation, part 3, 
chap. 5, pars. 31 and 32.] 

It is this complete grasp of the scope of human life from 
the inmost centre of being to outmost circumference of ex- 
istence, which gives to Boehme's teaching the aspect of an 
inexhaustible survey. With one sentence — this, for ex- 
ample, "God himself is the Being of all beings, and we 
are as gods in him " [ Threefold Life, chap. 6, par. 4] — he 
makes us feel that the capacities of man are as infinite as 
his destiny. Yet never must the qualification be lost sight 
of that man does not necessarily reveal Him who "is called 
God only according to the light, viz., in the powers of the 
light ; " but he must reveal either that holy one of God or 
the wrath of God, i.e., the anguishing forms of eternal 
nature unatoned. 



}6 Jacob Boehme 

Any attempt to give an idea of the circle of light opened 
to the student of Boehme is embarrassed by perceiving the 
commensurate darkness of mystery thus made visible by 
the abundance of revelations within that circle. I hesitate 
to prolong the attempt, and yet something must be said 
about the Wisdom so often referred to by him. For many 
years of unaided study this remains an insoluble and ob- 
structive enigma. The reader finds Virgin Sophia spoken 
of in a way that forbids every thought of allegoric meaning. 
It is under this designation that he reveals the Maternal 
Principle in Deity, sometimes calling it the " Corporeity of 
the Holy Ternary, the delight and playfellow of the most 
High ;" the "Eternal Mother, the great Mysterium Mag- 
num," through whom " the Eternal Word breathed itself 
forth into skill or knowledge, viz., into infinity of multiplic- 
ity " [Knowledge of All Things, par. 21 ] ; elsewhere "the 
Substantial Power of the great Love of God," and "the 
outflown Word" in contradistinction to the speaking Word. 

Into this most profound mystery I dare not enter further ; 
the unpublished writings of Mr. T. Lake Harris, and the 
beautiful " Morgenroethe" of the Rev. -J. Pulsford, have a 
little broken to the public mind this unfamiliar doctrine. In 
dim foreboding or remembrance it has never probably been 
long absent from subconscious human thought. Jane 
Lead 1 had been anticipated regarding her " Great Goddess 
and Queen of all Worlds" 2 by W. Postel in the 16th cent- 
ury, who taught " that the Word had become man, but that 
when it made itself woman then the world would be 
saved." A belief which some of our contemporaries 
warmly advocate at the present time. 

1 Jane Lead's " The Revelation of Revelations," page 45. 

2 To no subject would the following remark of the true meaning of the 
word revelation better apply than to this : — "Je prie mon lecteur de reflechir 
que comme le mot Velare signifie Voiler, de meme Revelare doit necessaire- 
ment signifier re voiler, ou voiler de nouveau ce qui aurait deja paru sous un 
Voile primitif." Words taken from an anonymous book, " Les Mysteres dn 
Christianisme approfondus radicalemeut ou La Verite," published in 1771. 



Jacob Boehme 37 

This belief in Divine Corporeity tallies with one of those 
marvellously fruitful revelations which every unprejudiced 
student will find to be so numerous in Boehme's writings ; 
his admission of substance as a sine qua non of true spiritual 
life. "There is a nature and substance in the outward 
world ; so also in the inward spiritual world there is a nat- 
ure and a substance which is spiritual, from which the out- 
ward world is breathed forth." — [Regeneration, chap. 2, 
par. 31.] 

The grossness of matter has discredited our ideas of sub- 
stance, and we are used to think of it as very far below 
spirit. He teaches that it is only inferior, as a manifesta- 
tion is inferior to the power manifested — that it bears to 
spirit precisely the same relation that body does to life. 
"No spirit," he says, " can bring anything to pass without 
essence." ( Wesen in the original, which means substance 
also.) — [Baptism, chap. 1, par. 16.] " Without substance 
no working can be." — [ Ibid, chap. 2, par. 11.] And his 
account of man's loss in the Fall is, "Our substance van- 
ished and shut up in death, was signified by the dry Rod 
of Aaron, which substance grew," . . . " where God's 
substance became man, in whom the holy fire could burn ; 
for the divine Ens which vanished in Adam, which grew 
again in such kindling, was the food of this love fire," . 
. . "and that same love burning was the new life of the 
regeneration." — [Baptism, chap. 2, par. 31.] 

" For Christ had also a soul and spirit out of Adam, and 
the precious dear Word of the Deity, together with God's 
Spirit, awakened and raised up again in Christ's flesh the 
dead substantiality, viz., the body which in Adam was 
dead." — [Incarnation, part 1, chap. 6, par. 13.] 

And he insists very forcibly on substance as well as spirit 
having been brought into human nature at the Incarnation 
of the Word. "Not spirit without substance, but the sub- 
stance of the spirit environed with God's Wisdom, Christ's 
flesh, which filleth the light world in every place ; which 



38 Jacob Boehme 

the Word that became man brought along with it into 
Mary." — [Incarnation, Part 2, chap. 9, par. 31.] 

Of which he notices the necessity elsewhere thus :— 
"Now where the Word is, there is also the Virgin or Wis- 
dom of God, for the Word is in the Wisdom, and the one 
is not without the other, or else the Eternity would be 
divided." — [ Threefold Life, chap. 6, par. 78.] 

"But when I speak of the Virgin of the Wisdom of God 
I mean not a thing that is circumscribed in a place, but I 
mean the whole deep of the Deity without end and num- 
ber." — [Ibid, chap. 5, par. 56.] 

Without attempting to touch upon the as yet unexplored 
mystery of the— so to speak — chemical action of the heaven- 
ly body and blood entering the corporeal solidarity of our 
race — and that much lies there within reach of spiritual dis- 
cernment I am well convinced, — the rectifying efficacy of 
this divine incarnation is made more intelligible to us by 
Boehme's teaching as to the formative effect of #// imagi- 
nations. That " Every imagination maketh substantiality" 
[ Threefold Life, chap. 10, par. 31 ] is one of his key notes. 
"Where there is no substance there is no creating ; where- 
as yet a creaturely spirit is no palpable substance, but it 
must draw a substance into itself through its imagination, 
else it would not subsist" — [Incarnation, Part 1, chap. 5, 
par. 88.] 

" A spirit out of nature is a magic fire source, and is de- 
sirous of substance, the desire maketh substance and bring- 
eth that substance into its imagination, that is the magic 
fire's corporeity, whence the spirit is called a creature." — 
[Apology 1, Part 2, par. 186.] 

"The soul in Adam is gone forth with its imagination 
into earthliness, away from true substantiality," and since 
then "the soul hath no image or body which remaineth 
eternally, unless it be through Christ regenerated out of its 
first substantiality." — [Apology r, part 2, pars. 373 and 
265.] 



Jacob Boehme 39 

Therefore "we must introduce our imagination and de- 
sire into him, that our tinder of the faded image in him may 
begin to glimmer or glow in the Spirit and power of Christ. 
— [ Apology 3, text 2, par. 49.] 

Of all Boehme's doctrines this perhaps is the most need- 
ful to modern divinity, i.e., that regeneration does not con- 
sist in a new spirit alone, but in a new creature, an ever- 
lasting body ; that this new-born creature is not itself divine, 
but that God dwells in it substantially — that it must remain 
hidden under corrupt flesh and blood till "Christ is formed 
in us," — Christ identified as to that body with the Lord 
Christ in whom Jesus, i.e., all the fulness of the Godhead, 
dwelt bodily ; Christ the anointed humanity, Jesus the 
Divine life anointing it with the holy oil which Adam's 
corrupt imagination, lusting after earthly things, had dried 
up. 

It is difficult to turn away from the rich treasures which 
crowd upon one's memory when trying to select the most 
desirable specimens of Boehme's gifts to mankind. W. Law 
did not overstate truth when he said that by him "the true 
ground of every doctrine and article of Christian faith and 
practice is opened in such a ravishing, amazing depth and 
clearness of truth and conviction as had never been seen or 
thought of in any age of the Church." . . . "His 
works being an opening of the Spirit of God working in 
him are quite out of the common path of man's reasoning 
wisdom, and proceed no more according to it, than the 
living plant breathes forth its virtues according to such 
rules of skill as an artist must use to set up a painted dead 
figure of it. But as the Spirit of God worked in the crea- 
tion of all things, so the same Spirit worked and opened in 
the depth and ground of his created soul an inward sensi- 
bility to it." 

As testimony from a totally different point of view let 
the opinion of a contemporary be weighed — one whose 
talents and peculiar opportunities alike qualified him for 



40 Jacob Boehme 

forming a just estimate. Writing in the Athenceum within 
the last fifteen years — ( I have not any note of the date with 
my cutting from it) — Mr. C. W. Heckethorn said : " Boeh- 
me's metaphysical system — the most perfect and only true 
one — still awaits a qualified commentator." . . . "In 
Boehme is to be found not only the true ground of all the- 
ology, but also that of all physical science. He demon- 
strated with a fulness, accuracy, completeness, and cer- 
tainty that leave nothing to be desired, the innermost 
ground of Deity and Nature ; and confining myself to the 
letter, I can from my own knowledge assert, that in Boeh- 
me's writings is to be found the true and clear demonstra- 
tion of every physical fact that has been discovered since 
his day. Thus the science of electricity^ which was not 
yet in existence when he v/rote, is there anticipated ; and 
not only does he describe all the more known phenoma of 
that force, but he even gives us the origin, generation, and 
birth of electricity itself. Again, positive evidence can be 
adduced that Newton derived all his knowledge of gravita- 
tion and its laws from Boehme." . . . "Every new 
scientific discovery goes to prove his profound and intuitive 
insight into the most secret workings of Nature ; and if 
scientific men, instead of sharing the prejudice arising from 
Boehme's system would place themselves on the vantage 
ground it affords, they would at once find themselves on an 
eminence whence they could behold all the arcana of 
Nature. Boehme's system, in fact, shows us the inside of 
things, while modern physical science is content with look- 
ing at the outside. Boehme traces back every outward 
manifestation or development to its one central root — to 
that central energy which as yet is only suspected ; every 
link in the chain of his demonstration is perfect, and there 
is not one link wanting. He carries us from the outbirths 
of the circumference along the radius to the centre or point, 
and beyond that even to the Zero, Nothing, with mathe- 
matical precision." 



Jacob Boehme 41 

Nevertheless, had Boehme read these words it is certain 
that he would have challenged the truth of the expression, 
Boehme s system. He repeatedly reminds his readers that 
he had none ; that when he described " the true ground and 
depth concerning what God is, and how all things are 
framed in God's being," ... he only "gave way to 
his impulse and will," and adds, "I am but a very little 
spark of light." "This work comes not from Reason, but 
from the impulse of the Spirit. Only be thou careful to get 
into thy spirit the Holy Ghost which issueth forth from 
God, and He will lead thee into all truth." — [Aurora, chap. 
2, par. 80 ; chap. 3, pars. 1 and 2. ] 

That this direct dependence upon a teacher, unfettered 
by ecclesiastical canons, would virtually exclude his books 
from the public, Boehme well knew, and if now and then 
he allows himself a caustic remark on this subject we can- 
not be surprised. Authorities had driven him from his 
home, after energetic persecutions, solely because he pro- 
claimed the lessons of a superior Instructor. Speaking of 
the "wiselings of outward reason" in his Mysterium Mag- 
num, chap. 12, par. 22, he says, "They have understand- 
ing already in the eyes of their Reason, and they cannot 
miss ; they can judge all things ; what the Spirit of God re- 
vealeth that must be a heresy unto them, albeit they do not 
understand it." And in his preface to the iyy Theosophic 
Questions, " Mr.Wiseling will dare to account it a sin to 
question so very high things, seeing himself cannot under- 
stand them." His summary in the opening of the Aurora 
of what "Mr. Critic, which worketh with his wit in the 
fierce quality, will say when he gets this booh into his hand,' 1 
is an accurately true account of just what is said by both 
the Mr. Wiselings and Mr. Critics of our own time. But 
claiming no superior wisdom of his own, he is careful to 
explain how he won all the knowledge he transmits. 
"Not through my understanding, but in my resignation in 
Christ : from Christ's Spirit have I received the knowledge — 



42 Jacob Boehme 

the great mystery." — [ Apology /, part 2, par. 301.] 

"Searching is not the chief or most especial means to 
know or apprehend the Mystery, but to be born of God is 
the right invention" — [Forty Questions, 1, par. 254] — and 
faithfully he warns us of what really prevents Divine light 
from penetrating to our minds. " Men go about to seek 
God in their own will and skill : men would find God in 
their own will, and He is not therein ; for He dwelleth only 
in that will which resigneth itself up with all its reason and 
skill to Him. To such an one He giveth real living knowl- 
edge and power to understand His being. Therefore we 
shall be dumb, dark, and historical to every one that is not 
born of God." . . . "He that will not seek thereby 
to be a new man born in God, and wholly and unfeignedly 
apply himself thereto, let him let my writings alone and 
leave them uncensured. I have written nothing for such a 
seeker ; also, he will not be able wholly to understand our 
meaning, though he exerciseth much about it, unless he 
entereth into the resignation in Christ, and there he may 
obtain and apprehend the Spirit of the Universal ; and we 
will warn the curious critic, speculator, and rational artist, 
that he amuse not himself ; he effecteth nothing in this way 
except he himself entereth thereinto." — [A Warning from 
y. Boehme, pars. 4 and 7.] 

And in one of his prefaces he tells us that he shuts and 
locks up his book with a strong l bolt or bar, from the un- 
derstanding of those who cavil at his writings in a proud, 
haughty way. What this bolt is we discover in the follow- 
ing sentence of W. Law's : — "Above every writer in the 
world he has made all that is found in the kingdom of grace 
and the kingdom of nature, to be one continual demonstra- 
tion that dying to self, to be born again of Christ, is the one 
only possible salvation for the sons of fallen Adam." This 
is really the insuperable difficulty which his writings pre- 
sent to all, which intellect is powerless to overcome. Be- 

1 Preface to his Three Principles. 



Jacob Boebme 43 

fore that central truth there is, as Boehme says, "a strong 
lock and bar that must be first unlocked, and that no man 
can do ; for the Holy Ghost is the only key to do it withal. 
Therefore, if thou wilt have an open gate into the Deity, 
then thou must stir and walk in God's love." — [Aurora, 
chap. 13, par. 31.] 

"And we admonish the loving reader to immerse him- 
self in Divine humility into God and his fellow branch or 
brother, and so he may read and conceive our received deep 
sense and apprehension, and be brought from all error into 
the true rest wherein all things rest in the Word and power 
of God." — [ Preface to Election of Grace, par. 17.] 

How deep a rest they only know who have reached it ; 
but the immersion into profound humility is very difficult 
to those who have been used to teach with authority ; as 
Freher expresses it when touching upon the unwillingness 
of "some of the learned " to read and consider what Boeh- 
me offers ; "they account themselves so full with their 
present wisdom and knowledge, that they have no room 
to desire any other, especially that which cannot be attained 
without casting away the high esteem of that which they 
have laid up as a treasure to themselves already ; and so 
every little difficulty of uncouth words or phrases and ex- 
pressions, which they cannot presently see to agree with 
their former opinions, makes them loath to be troubled 
about that which they think themselves to have more and 
better knowledge of beforehand. Neither can they in rea- 
son be blamed, save that they block up their own way to 
inestimable treasures which they know not of, and others 
not so learned attain. " ' ' From the beginning of the world, " 
said W. Law writing to Dr. Sherlock, "nothing extraordi- 
nary in the way of instruction ever came from God, but met 
its chief opposition from that which was the reigning wis- 
dom of the time." 

But now, for such students as can free themselves from 
slavery to any "reigning wisdom," and seek it where no 



44 Jacob Boehme 

ecclesiastical finger-posts point out merit, it only remains 
to cite a few practical hints for the best mode of approach 
to Boehme's treasure. With his translator, John Sparrow, 
I can say, "I also, who have much and studiously traced 
his writings over, have found them difficult, but far ex- 
ceeding in recompense the utmost pains that I could possi- 
bly bestow on them ; I find also that the understanding of 
them cometh by degrees, and frequent loving conversation 
in all the parts and pieces he has written." — [ Preface to 
Aurora.] 

When W. Law sent two volumes of Boehme's works to 
his friend, the Rev. Mr. Neve, he wrote, " The time will 
come when such supposed mysteries in J. B. will no more 
lessen your opinion of that fountain of light which was 
opened in him, than the spots which are said to be dis- 
covered on the sun do make you suspect it not to be a body 
of light. Read these volumes through, without staying at 
that which you do not comprehend, and you will all along 
see both why you should continue reading, and why you 
must be content to learn very gradually, and also whence 
it is that the greatest and most concerning truths are such a 
mystery to us." 

But he best guides us himself as to such studies when he 
says, " If you have a desire and delight to read my writ- 
ings, read them diligently, and especially apply yourselves 
to the Centre of all Beings, and then the Three Principles 
will be plain and easy to you, and I know, and am assured, 
that if you apprehend the Centre in the Spirit it will afford 
you such joy as far surpasseth the joy of the whole world, 
for the precious stone of the wise men lieth therein, which 
giveth the certainty and real ground of all things ; it freeth 
man from all trouble and perplexive thoughts in the con- 
troversies of religion, and it openeth unto him the highest 
mystery that is in him." — [A Warning from J. Boehme, 
par. 20.] And again in his preface to the CI avis : " When 
a man reads such writings and yet cannot understand them, 



Jacob Bo eh me 45 

he must not presently throw them away, and think it im- 
possible to understand them ; no, but he must turn his 
mind to God, beseeching Him for grace and understanding, 
read again, and then he shall see more and more in them, 
till at length he is drawn by the power of God into the very 
depth itself, and so comes into the supernatural ground, 
viz., into the Eternal Unity of God, where he shall hear un- 
speakable words of God, which shall bring him back and 
outward again by the Divine Effluence to the very grossest 
and meanest matter of the earth, and then back and inwards 
to God again." — [ CI avis, par. 8.] 

Shall a teacher, from whom Sir Isaac Newton learned 
secrets of physical nature, and Hegel a whole transformation 
of German philosophy, remain unstudied by all but a few 
sequestered thinkers in Great Britain ? Are we so befooled 
by precedent, have the narcotics of "received opinion" 
made our many searching intellects drowsy in " the easie 
ways of ancient mis takings ? " It will not always be so. 
Freher was surely a true prophet when he said, " I am as- 
sured with Boehme that this knowledge and understanding 
shall be raised up out of the dust and darkness, in the due 
time of God, and shall not be further so hidden, unknown, 
and unintelligible to the children of men as it hath been to 
the generality thereof since the beginning of the world — 
(he refers to man's knowledge of 'Divine mysteries') ; 
when another generation shall be upon the earth, they that 
then live shall again bless and praise God that He hath un- 
locked His secret treasures, and poured out His spirit of un- 
derstanding upon them that know Him, and are deeply 
rooted in true love and divine humility." Now, Freher's 
contemporaneous generation has long passed away ; and 
many secret treasures of spiritual knowledge have been un- 
locked since he wrote — is it from want of charity and hu- 
mility that Boehme' s are still unopened? It may be so ; 
" mysteries are revealed to the meek." 



ON THE WORLD-SOUL 

With regard to this subject I consider myself to be merely 
in the position of a carrier. Asked to try and explain that 
which I do but dimly apprehend, 1 go to my favourite ware- 
house for spiritual truths, and putting together a few of 
those which I deem most valuable, I bring them to light 
with a very clear address — " To those only who care for the 
toil of searching for obscure truth." My freight will be 
worse than rubbish to any other kind of reader — irritating, 
because when language fails to convey definite ideas, one of 
two facts is certain ; either words have been misused, or 
the reader's mind is not able to grasp the thought or in- 
formation offered ; and it is not usual to accept this last 
conclusion. To those who, glancing at my pack of un- 
couth words, call them nonsense, I can only say that re- 
proach may cut both ways ; such people have no sense of 
their value. Those, again, who think it rash, presumptu- 
ous, or profane to dive into such an abyss of necessary ig- 
norance in quest of some gleam of light, I would entreat to 
leave it unexamined : for to many minds such inquiry is 
hurtful rather than useless, because if no curiosity is awake, 
the attempt to gratify it must appear in a very high degree 
absurd. But it is not fair to sacrifice the interests of the few 
to the tastes or prejudices of the many ; and there are those 
among us to whom the mystery of creation and all its tre- 
mendous problems of evil and pain are a source of deep un- 
rest ; who cannot accept the solution offered by theology, 
because in truth this is more of an evasion than a clearing 
up ; and who say they cannot leave untouched the fretting 
knots of doubt, while they wait in faith and patience till 
"the veil that is spread over all nations " 1 is lifted. How 
should they wait a Heavenly Father's good time for reliev- 

1 Isaiah xxv, 7. 



Jacob Boehme 47 

ing doubt and perplexity who are so dismayed by the 
seeming mercilessness of fate in our present world that they 
question the existence of such a Father ? This state of 
mind, and all its varying shades of despondency or "ag- 
nosticism," is too well known to need explanation : it is 
for the wants of a mind in such states that I bring to the 
most likely market these burdens dug out with no small 
effort from Boehme's mine. But for him I might have been 
as unsettled and unhappy, — finding ordinary theological 
teaching, in Bible phraseology, a " bed shorter than that a 
man can stretch himself on it," 1 and plagued at heart by 
the discords so frequently made by history and experience 
in the deep underlying consciousness of an ever-present 
God. In the following extracts I propose to give, as brief- 
ly as may be, Boehme's account of the origin of opposing 
wills in the life that derives from one God, and cannot ex- 
ist out of that Infinitude of Being however much they con- 
flict and this will necessitate a glance at his interpretation 
of the cause of sin and evil in any shape. Then his fre- 
quent mention of the soul or spirit of the world (for he 
uses the words indiscriminately when speaking of the 
microcosm ) will fall into place. If these different aspects 
of the world-soul do not suggest some valuable germs of 
thought I shall be disappointed. My package but contains 
samples ; readers who appreciate these will find much more 
help in the context, and I shall be greatly surprised if those 
who will give a little persevering study to Boehme's books, 
passing over all that lacks any meaning at first, and ab- 
sorbing passively all they can understand, do not very soon 
become aware that they have found access to the roots of 
many a mystery that "the law behind the law" in nature 
and spirit is here to be discovered. 

It has long been an accepted belief — resting on the first 
chapter of Genesis — that the stars were called into existence 
before the creation of man. My assumption, for it is noth- 

1 Isaiah xxviii, 20. 



48 Jacob Boehme 

ing more reliable, is that our world-soul was one of the 
earlier emanations of the Most High God ; but of a later 
date than the "throne angels," one of whom was the first 
rebel, the first dupe of pride — " Lucifer, Son of the Morn- 
ing" (for I am old-fashioned enough to believe in a spirit- 
ual adversary of our God) — and that according to the law 
of Spirits l it produced as the executive of the creative Word 
this visible world, of which man afterwards became in- 
habitant. That this world-soul was corrupted by the evil 
magnetism of the soul of another orb, Mr. T. Lake Harris 
told us some years ago. At the end of my extracts from 
Boehme I shall add his report of this and the other world- 
souls of which he became cognizant in a trance of many 
months' duration ; and venturing to add that being quite 
beyond our ken or previous guess does not make the facts 
asserted impossible or ridiculous, though the king of a 
tropical country who was first told of snow and solid ice 
found them so, — I pass on to my business of porterage. 

"In God all beings are but one being, viz., an eternal 
One or unity, the eternal only good, which eternal One 
without severalty were not manifest to itself. Therefore 
the same hath breathed forth itself out of itself that a plu- 
rality and distinct variety might arise, which variety or 
severalty hath induced itself into a peculiar will and pro- 
perties, the properties into desires, and the desires into 
beings." — [ Epistle 6, pars. 8, 9.] 

"The visible world with its hosts and creatures is noth- 
ing but the outflown word which hath introduced itself into 
properties, where in the properties an own selfwill is ex- 
isted. And with the receptibility of the willing is the 
creaturely life existed." — [ Divine Vision, chap. 3, pars. 22, 

23.] 

"And yet if there must exist a receptibility, then there 

1 "The soul is the principle or beginning of life, that contains the plastick 
power whereby the body is formed according to a spiritual idea ( or pattern ) 
in the mind, and thus acquires a distinct appearance. The soul is therefore 
the workman or framer of the body." — Van Helmont's Thoughts on Gene- 



Jacob Boehme 49 

must be an own desire to the perceptibility of itself ; viz. : a 
selfwill which is not, nor willeth like unto the one only 
will ; for the one only will willeth nothing else but the one 
only good which itself is ; it willeth no other than itself in 
the likeness. But the outflown will willeth the unlikeness, 
that it may be distinguished from the likeness, and be its 
own somewhat." — [ Third Theosophic Chtestions, pars. 9, 10.] 

Here we must turn to his exposition of " How Sinne is 
Sinne." "God dwelleth in All, and there is nothing that 
comprehendeth Him, unless it be one with Him ; and if it 
departeth out of that One, then doth it depart out from 
God, into itself, and is somewhat else besides God ; and 
that devideth or separateth itself. And hence the law doth 
exist, that it must go again out of itself into that One, or 
else be separated from that One. Thus it may be known 
what sinne is, or how it is sinne, viz., the human will 
which separateth itself from God into its own selfness, and 
awakeneth its own self and burneth in its own source." — 
[ Third of the Small Six Points, pars. 42, 43.] 

Now for the understanding of this passage one need only 
remember that discord can be made by sounding musical 
notes not in harmony and yet within the octave : the self 
cannot leave the All of God, but in contracting its self-ful 
"somewhat" it severs part of that all from the rest, and 
dissonance results. The comparison may suggest the 
thought that occasional discords increase musical harmony : 
even so ; in the resolving of those discords a well-trained 
ear finds most subtle delight. But if those discords were 
to ache on the sense of- hearing for a long time together, 
the effect would be painfully different. The discords in 
the human soul last so long that we need vast stretches of 
eternity for their return to harmony, and for these souls' 
release from anguish and unrest. Nevertheless, I dare 
believe that ultimate extensions of good will be educed by 
the Master's hand from the seemingly eternal misery of 
sin, and one sentence in the page next to that I quote from 
4 



50 Jacob Boehme 

last supplies a hint full of meaning for those who can fol- 
low it out : 

"Therefore there must a new will grow out of this op- 
posite will, that so it may give up itself again into that one 
only union, and the contrary opposite will must be broken 
and slain, . ... and so the will that is thus departed" 
(from self) "dwelleth in God, . . . and is then 
known to be a new birth, for it re-assumes all again into 
itself, in that One, but not with its own self desire, but with 
its own love which is united with and in God, so that God 
is all in all, and his will is the will of all things, for one 
only will subsisteth in God." — [Third of the Small Six 
Points," pars. 50, 52.] 

And that, too, is St. Paul's account of the final issue of 
man's earthly tragedy. Now will not all that is re-assumed 
be of inestimable value ? A simile may elucidate facts, but 
never satisfy in lieu of a reason, and it may be asked, how 
can any properties derived from perfect good cause evil ? 
A question that cannot be evaded ; and though to answer 
it fully, as Boehme can and does answer it, would be im- 
possible here, I must give in fewest words the best idea I 
can of his solution of the enigma. 

He tells us of the seven Spirits of God, of the seven forces 
ceaselessly interacting in eternal nature, which form the 
base of every life. To name these is not to explain but to 
puzzle ; and in the slight variety of his account of two or 
three of them one finds additional perplexity ; yet these, 
astringency, mobility, anguish ( consequent on the effort of 
these two first to escape from each other ), fire — struck up 
from the violence of the contest ; — and then love, — equiva- 
lent in his system to light — sound and substantiality are the 
roughly indicated names he gives to the seven activities of 
the Eternal Spirit. ( And we must remember that the un- 
couth and insufficient designation of a seer of such agents 
as these, proves nothing against their actual existence.) 
Now on the due evolution of these, all good depends, the 



Jacob Boehme 51 

first three being the root of the perfect blissfulness rising 
from the last three ; but if the fire caused by the struggle 
of the first three does not develop light and its conse- 
quences, then evil begins, for — "The four first forms in 
themselves are the wrath and the anger of God in the eter- 
nal nature ; and they are in themselves nothing else but 
such a source or property as standeth in the darkness, and 
is not material, but an originality of the Spirit, without 
which there would be nothing. For the four forms are the 
cause of all things, as you may perceive that every life hath 
poison, yea, the poison itself is the life." — [ Threefold Life 
of Man, chap. 2, par. 44.] * 

1 1 am so little satisfied with my own attempt to give any just idea of 
this doctrine of Boehme's, that I am fain to give Franz Baader's, which seems 
to me to make it more intelligible, even in rough translation : — 

"The number seven contains a double ternary and a centre number.'' 
" Self-hood arises in disseverance ; own will perceives and desires to establish 
itself, and hereby places itself in a contradiction. This is urged onward 
through the second and third form of nature to its climax. Hence the three 
first forms make up all that is negative — the perverted ternary. But when 
the contradiction, whilst pushing on to the furthest point, or climax, has ex- 
hausted itself, then subjection takes place in a flash ( Boehme's schrach or 
skreek ) , and now arises the other ternary in love, joy, and substantial be- 
ing. One must begin the arrangement of seven forms of nature by fire, be- 
cause it is the middle, where self-hood originates. J. Boehme began from the 
first, and therefore his representation and development of them is not quite 
successful. In fire the self-hood originates, and can go forward or backwards 
to the first or second ternary. Whoever desires to manifest himself impedes 
the source of his right manifestation, and evokes pain to himself." . . . 
" In the fourth form the spirit has not yet sound or scent or seeing, it is the 
Father, the formative will, the yet unactuated magic spirit. From the fourth 
form it can go, imagining, into the fifth, from whence it can mould itself in 
the sixth, and in the seventh become perfected as body : or it can go back- 
wards out of the fourth form into the third, when it will be formed into the 
second, and completed in the first. The first and seventh, the second and 
sixth, the third and fifth form, correspond to each other. The first form is 
merely excluding, denying ; the seventh is also that, essentially, but softened 
and tempered. The first and seventh together are the includers of all com- 
formable essences. The second is the dividing, pulverising, destroying prin- 
ciple ; this in the sixth form develops itself as the rightly moulding principle. 
. . . In the third is a mere fulness of conflicting atoms, in the fifth form 



52 Jacob Boehtne 

It will be easily understood what sort of anguish and of 
unsuccessful strength must result from a tierce hunger for 
getting and keeping — due to dominant astringency, or from 
a bitter, restless striving for advance — when the second 
form rules, or to intense susceptibility to the influence of 
such contending impulse, when love has not softened and 
enlightened, or the true " intellective understanding" which 
Boehme ascribes to the action of the sixth from — sound — 
been opened; nor the rest or perfected bliss of heavenly 
substantiality been attained. Necessarily such conflict 
would kindle heat in that awful abyss of fire which is the 
soul ; and the will of man, — the immortal part which was 
anterior to time — roused more or less by every provocative 
from within or without— must make unharmonised natures 
what every day shows us they are ; nay! proves in some 
degree within each of us. Here then we get the meaning 
of the saying — "All whatsoever it is that liveth and mov- 
eth, is in God, and God himself is all, and all whatsoever 
is formed or framed, is formed out of Him, be it either out 
of love or out of wrath." — [Aurora, chap. 15, par. 145.] ] 

With more clearness than is usual to him, Boehme states 
the paradox, and answers it in the same book. [ chap. 9, 
pars. 78, 79.] 

"Seeing God is everywhere, and is himself all, how 
cometh it then that there is in this world such cold and 

they are united, and the mutual dependency of fellow members and self-life 
comes into play. In the third form multiplicity was without unity, and 
unity without multiplicity ; in the fifth all is in one and one in all. It is al- 
ways radically the same principle which rules in the first and seventh, in the 
second and sixth, in the third and fifth form, but in one case the destructive 
principle is dominant, in the other light." ( I am not so sure of this elucidat- 
ing, but at least it is the explanation of a powerful man's brain, and so I hope 
it may serve. ) 

1 Any one who can refer to Boehme's First Apologie to Balthazar Tylken, 
will find this mystery of good and evil most fully examined ; in the first part 
he labours to throw light upon it, less systematically than in his Treatise on 
Election, but perhaps more effectually because of the many postures into 
which he throws the mind while confronting hostile criticism. 



Jacob Boehme 53 

heat, such biting and striking among all creatures, and that 
there is nothing else almost but mere fierceness or wrath in 
this world ? The cause is that the first four forms of nature 
are one at enmity against the other without the light, and 
yet they are the causes of life." 

There is hardly a single work of his in which this origin 
of evil is not harped upon, so that anyone who possesses 
either of his books can fill up this imperfect outline by ref- 
erence to it ; and I may proceed to the main topic of this 
paper. 

" The living Word of God, which is God himself," . 
. . "speaketh itself through nature forth into a Spirit of 
the world in Spiritu Mundi, as a Soul of the Creation. And 
in the speaking forth or expression is again the distinction 
or severation into the fiery astral root in Spiritu Mundi." 

. . . "The Spirit of the World is now the Life of 
the Outward World." — [ Treatise on Election, chap. 5, pars. 

47> 52.] 

"/« Spiritu Mundi, many evil workings spring forth 
which appear contrary to God ; also, that one creature 
hurts, worries, and slays another ; also that wars, pesti- 
lence, thunder, and hail happen. All this lies in the Spirit 
of the World, and arises from the first three properties, 
wherein they break and frame themselves in their opposite 
will. For God can give or afford nothing but that which is 
good, for he is alone the only good, and never changes into 
any evil at all, neither can he, for he would then cease to 
be a God. But in the word of his revelation or manifesta- 
tion, wherein the forms, qualities, or dispositions arise, viz., 
wherein nature and creature arises, there exists the work- 
ing or framing into evil and good." — [Ibid, chap. 6, par. 

63.] 

I must here parenthetically observe how great a strain 
upon faith is removed by this explanation of evil. Every 
thoughtful child sees the contradictions of external nature 
to what he is taught of an all-loving Creator. He hears of 



54 Jacob Boehme 

sudden destruction from storms and earthquakes, and is 
told that these are sent in mercy for the chastisement of 
sinful man, or for the exercise of submissive faith, and that 
idea he can assimilate in some measure, his mother even 
having inflicted corrective trials now and then ; but he sees 
the cruelty of animals tormenting and devouring each 
other — cats with mice for example — and asks, "Why did 
the good God cause this ? " " It was not so from the be- 
ginning ; it is a consequence of the fall of Adam," is gener- 
ally the pious rejoinder ; which as soon as he is able to 
think a little longer upon the point he must feel to be a put 
off: what connection can there be in mercy or in justice be- 
tween the sin of mankind and the sufferings of irresponsible 
beasts ? Now in all Boehme tells of the world-soul the 
connecting cause is found. To him also it was the key to 
those wonders of vindictive wrath in the historic books of 
our Old Testament, which scandalize so many of its benev- 
olent sceptical critics in our day. [ See Three Principles, 
chap. 1 8, par. 29, and chap. 20, pars. 20, 24.] 

"The other life" (the temporal life contrasted with the 
eternal life in this passage) 'Ms an inceptive beginning 
efflux of the seperator of all powers, and is called the soul 
of the outward world, which life in the outflown proper- 
ties is become creaturely, and is a life of all creatures of the 
visible world wherewith the seperator or Creator of 
this visible world imageth itself and maketh a similitude 
according to the spiritual world." — {Divine Vision, chap. 
3, par. 30.] 

" The stars and elements are a substance of the Spiritus 
Mundi." — [ Treatise on Election, chap. 8, par. 4.] 

" The earth is a hunger as to the Spirit of the world, for 
it is sprung forth and divided from it." — [Ibid, chap. 5, 
par. 54.] 

"Moses says God made man of the dust of the earth, and 
breathed into him the living breath, and then man became 
a living soul. But we are here to understand that God did 



Jacob Boehme 55 

not in a personal and creaturely manner stand by like a man 
and take a lump or clod of earth and make a body of it ; 
no, it was not so. But the Word of God was in all pro- 
perties in Spiritu Mundi and in the ens, or being of the 
earth, stirring up from the spirit of the world, and spoke or 
breathed forth a life into every essence." — [ Treatise on 
Election, chap. 5, pars. 87, 88.] 

"Our first parents, with their spirit, are gone out of the 
heavenly paradise into the Spirit of this world, where then 
the Spirit of this world instantly captivated their body and 
made it earthly." — [ Three Principles, chap. 22, par. 16.] 

"The Spirit of the World had captivated Adam and in- 
troduced its substantiality into his imagination, "[/^rs/ 
Apologie, part 2, par. 577.] 

11 Adam with his mind was not in God, but in the Spirit 
of this world, and he became feeble as to the Kingdom of 
God, and so fell down and slept. And then God, by the 
Spirit of this world, through the Fiat, built or formed out 
of him the woman of this world." — {Ibid, chap. 17, par. 

54.] 

"In his sleep the Spirit of this world clothed him with 
flesh and blood, and figured him into a beast, as we now 
see by very woeful experience." — [ Three Principles, chap. 
17, par 55. ] 

"Adam must carry the untoward gross body that the 
Spirit of the world hath put upon him." — [ Three Principles, 
chap. 25, par. 31.] 

"God the Lord, through the Spirit of this world, made 
them coats of the skins of beasts, and put those on them, 
that they might see that according to this outward world 
they were beasts." — [ Ibid, chap. 20, par. 6.] 

"As this world breaketh and passeth away, so also all 
flesh which is generated out of the Spirit of this world 
must break and pass away." — [ Ibid, chap. 19, par. 7.] 

"As soon as Adam was overcome by the Spirit of this 
world, then he fell into sleep, viz., into the outward magia, 



56 Jacob Boehme 

which signifieth or resembleth death, for the outward king- 
dom hath beginning and end, and must break off from the 
inward ; that is its death." — [ First Apologie, par. 215.] 

"All whatsoever we think, do, and purpose in the out- 
ward man, that the Spirit of this world doth in us men, for 
the body is nothing else but the instrument thereof, where- 
with it performeth its work." — [ Three Principles, chap. 
25, par. 1.] 

The same dislike which exists with regard to belief in 
planetary influence on the fate of human beings will un- 
doubtedly be felt for this idea of a great Spirit ruling in 
material nature. It is an empire within that of the Su- 
preme Ruler which is claimed and as such it is eagerly 
denied, both because it runs counter to preconceived no- 
tions, and because godly jealousy takes alarm. And though 
other gods than the God are recognised throughout the 
Bible, as for example "against all the gods of Egypt I will 
execute judgement," and "Worship him, all ye gods," de- 
vout people will unhesitatingly maintain that the gods 
spoken of thus are only idols of wood and stone. 

" The wise heathen," says Boehme, "have understood 
that subject and have honoured them" (throne angels) 
"for gods, yet they missed the true ground of the inward- 
ness ; but among the Christians it is altogether silent or 
dumb except to some few, to whom God hath manifested 
or revealed it." — [Sixth Theosophic Question, par. 18.] 

Surely this anxiety to prove the non-existence of other 
spiritual potentates in the universe arises from an estimate 
far too low of man's superiority of origin and ultimate 
destiny! 

The second birth of regeneration restores his latent 
powers in possibility ; and when these are fully developed 
neither the stars, nor elements, nor Spirit of this world will 
be able any longer to rule over him ; for "we are children 
of the omnipotency of God, and inherit His goods in the 



Jacob Boehme 57 

omnipotency." — [Sixth of the Fourth Questions, par. 28.] 

It is a little singular that the fate-forming influence of un- 
seen powers should be ignored as being incompatible with 
free-will, when the power of parents to mould their child- 
ren's fate is so unquestioned. Yet by free-will we do not 
understand a will free from bias or obstruction, but one 
which is free, within the narrow limits of temporal fetters, 
to choose between the good and evil left open to choice ; 
that decision in a restricted scope leading to unlimited con- 
sequences of self-formation either for good or ill. 

"The Spirit of this world hath so very much longed 
after man and hath drawn him to it, that it might show 
forth its wonders in him, that man should produce all arts 
and languages in it" (the Spirit of this world). . . . 
"We declare unto you that the Spirit of this world is 
created with such an inclination ; and that it hath a natural 
will to reveal itself and all its mysteries, as we see before 
our eyes, by what it hath built or brought forth, how it 
hath erected a dominion and kingdom upon earth. Do but 
look upon the doings of man from the highest to the low- 
est ; the Spirit of this world hath thus built the whole order 
of them and God hath permitted it." — [ Threefold Life, 
chap. 9, pars. 7, 8, and 9.] 

Yes, for in every case the terrible truth holds good that — 
" Whereinto a Spirit introduces its longing imagination the 
essence and property of that it receives is the great mys- 
tery of all Beings." . . "The Will-Spirit is free, it is the 
eternal original, let it do what it will." — [Signatura Rerum, 
chap. 16, pars. 25, 26.] 

But out of the great mystery of all Beings, One has en- 
tered into the soul of the human race, whose longing im- 
agination is to save it from all bondage, and meanwhile the 
multiplicity of self-ful wills are in their unhappy servitude 
correcting and limiting the hurtful agencies of each other. 

"The Heart of God with His desiring standeth towards 
us with His imagining." — [ Incarnation, part 3, chap. 7, 
par. 20.] 



58 Jacob Boehme 

A digression must here be made with regard to the soul 
of man. When Boehme speaks of it without qualification, 
he always refers to the "fire Spirit, the true essential soul," 
of which he affirms over and over again, li it hath had no 
beginning: also it will have no end." — [ Treatise on the In- 
carnation, part i, chap. 3, pars. 52, 54.] 

But of another that had beginning and must end he tells 
us the World-Soul was the deputed originator: — "The 
outward created life from or out of this world, viz., from 
the sun, stars, and elements, which God, with or by the 
Spirit of the great world, breathed into Adam's nostrils, 
wherein then he became also an outward soul." — [Ibid, 
part 3, chap. 5, pars. 74, 75.] 

It is this' "outward soul," so far as I can learn, that is 
sustained by the World-Soul on its lower plane, precisely 
as the true soul of man lives in and by the Supreme Being ; 
and I should suppose from analogy that at dissolution, or at 
any subsequent period when the spirit of man is released 
from the magnetic attraction of animal life, the animal soul 
became one with the World-Soul. * 

Before this merging of the individual in the universal, 
there is no doubt a possibility of gaining access to the forces 
of this "Cosmic Spirit," and subordinating them to the 
purposes of man. Mr. Sinnett's friend, Koot Hoomi, refers 
to this power when he speaks of a process yet unknown to 
the people of the West for "strengthening and refining 
those mysterious links of sympathy between intelligent 
men — the temporarily isolated fragments of the universal 
soul, and the Cosmic Soul itself; "bringing them into full 
rapport." [ Occult World, p. 145.] And by such full 
rapport 1 suppose most of the miracles of Oriental adepts 
are performed. I neither question the power nor its re- 

1 I account for the infallible wisdom of animals' instinct by their undivided 
union with the World-Soul ; were we as wholly surrendered to the will of 
Him in whom our spirits have their being, sin and folly would not so striking- 
ly distinguish the human race. 



Jacob Boehme 59 

suits, but while maintaining that this is not the highest ex- 
ercise of human powers, I see that these last have so much 
fallen into abeyance that to the majority of minds this co- 
operation with the Cosmic Spirit would appear the highest, 
and its danger would not appear. Until it is understood 
how much the mediumship of man is coveted by that great 
Spirit of the world, its ability first to fascinate and then to 
subdue to a lower range of power or less abiding results 
would never be suspected ; for while we are in mortal 
bodies every unseen spiritual agent has a sort of prestige : 
we cannot see its limits, and our own are constantly felt. 

Yet it is no empty boast to say that the soul of man is 
potentially incomparably superior to the spirit of this outer 
world ; it was made in the likeness of God ; it has ability 
to be made one with Him to whom is given all power and 
all dominion both in Heaven and earth ; it is to be instru- 
mental for opening the infinite wonders of Divine wisdom, 
which as much exceed those of the mundane soul as eter- 
nity surpasses time. And it is this sense of latent power, 
coupled with faith in the promises of God, repeated from 
century to century, which leads many people to shun ac- 
cess to the ambiguous agents of the mundane soul, in 
seances for instance, lest a lower attraction should divert 
them from the higher, and various and conflicting testimony 
of finite spirits drown the still small voice of the spirit 
nearest of all who speaks to us from the centre of our be- 
ing. 

1 am quite conscious of the offence that will be given to 
many whose faith I most sincerely respect by the notion of 
anything less than the direct action of the God of all Gods 
in creation, and in all subsequent human agencies. To 
such people the idea of a "Cosmic Spirit" acting as vice- 
regent in the outer world will be shocking ; a similar shock 
is given to the devout ignorance of an uneducated person 
if one says that thunder results from such and such well 
understood processes of nature, or that the cause of a rain- 



60 Jacob Boehme 

bow is explained by the laws of refraction of light. Im- 
possible ; thunder is the voice of God ; is it not said so in 
Job, chap, xl, 9 ? and in Genesis that God would set his 
bow in the cloud ? In vain one speaks to such readers of 
secondary agents ; they may listen and keep silence, but 
will think your views profane, — and be "of the same 
opinion still." 

On minds better instructed I would fain press the con- 
sideration that intermediate powers in no wise diminish the 
supreme majesty and infinite power of the One from whom 
all existences derive ; and that the action of subordinate 
wills being wholly dependent on the measure of life and 
ability taken up from the all-permeating efflux of Eternal 
Nature, it may be truly affirmed, though it sounds paradox- 
ical, that all that happens in creation is done by Divine 
forces, but not all according to the will of God ; which only 
Boehme can adequately explain, therefore he must be 
quoted from again : — "We know that God is a Spirit, and 
His eternal will is magical, that is desirous ; He always 
maketh substance out of nothing, and that in a two-fold 
source, viz., according to the fire and light. Out of the fire 
cometh fierce wrath, climbing up pride, willing not to unite 
itself with the light, but a fierce, wrathful, eager, earnest 
will, according to which He is not called God, but a fierce, 
wrathful, consuming fire. This fire becometh also not 
manifest in the pure Deity, for the light hath swallowed up 
the fire into itself, and giveth to the fire its love, its sub- 
stantiality, its water, so that in God's substance there is only 
love, joy, and a pleasant habitation, and no fire known. 
But the fire is only a cause of the desirous will and of the 
love, as also of the light and of the majesty, else there 
would be no substance : as it hath been expounded in the 
former writings." — [On the Incarnation, part i, chap. 11, 
pars. 44 to 48.] 

It is only thus that we are enabled to understand many a 
discrepancy in the Bible between the emphatic announce- 



Jacob Boehme 61 

ments of Divine mercy and exceeding pitifulness, — the un- 
conditional "God is Love," and commands and transact- 
ions which outrage every instinctive sense of pity. These 
disagreements are usually passed over as what are beyond 
the scope of human judgment. To the faithful the sub- 
missive inquiry, ''Shall not the Judge of all the earth do 
right ? " is a sufficient quietus ; but now that faith ebbs 
apace is it not well to remove from the scoffer's range any 
difficulty for which we can apprehend a possible mode of 
reconciling reason to faith ? Comprehension is quite an- 
other phase of knowledge ; and on this subject unprejudiced 
study has hardly begun. 

Extracts from Mr. T. Lake Harris's "Arcana of Christian- 
ity," should be prefaced by the reminder that they were 
communicated in a state of trance ; and are not the result of 
cogitation or derived opinions. This fact may give them 
more or less weight, according to the tendencies of the 
reader. Ten years ago I confess to having looked upon 
these books as a stupendous instance of unbridled fancy : 
but much study of very different writers, and principally of 
Boehme, during all these ten years, has brought to light so 
many wonderful agreeements with, and confirmations of, 
the statements they contain, that I read in them now to 
learn and not to judge. 

"Every sun has a solar spirit." . . "Every planetary 
orb of the terrestrial sort a terrestrial spirit. The spirit of 
every orb is diffused into, and lives throughout, its mineral, 
animal, and human kingdoms, and is an immortal entity, a 
living, indivisible, and instinctively conscious existence, 
but is without human personality, and so abstractedly con- 
scious of pleasure or pain, but without power to determine 
its own sensations, lnsphered in every solar, aromal, or 
terrestrial planetary world, is an appropriate World-Soul, 
living in the life of all its distinct creations, and permeating 
alike its atmospheres, its waters, its material crust, and its 
electro-igneous centre. These World-Souls comprise the 



62 Jacob Boehme 

first family of God, and their number is as that of the 
stars." . . " They are absorptive organs for the Divine 
Spirit ; and pervading each its own world, and living in all 
its parts, they distribute throughout matter the Divine vi- 
tality." . . "I was given to understand that the World- 
Soul of one planet had become inverted from light to dark- 
ness, in consequence of the abandonment of its race to 
moral evil ; that the external body of that orb had long since 
been dissipated ; but that the psychical form of the planet 
still adhered together, and was the abyss spoken of in 
ancient days." . . "The lost Spirits from that orb were 
the first tempters and deceivers of our human race." . . 
"The World-Soul of our orb is exceedingly afflicted, and 
suffers in all the inversions of Divine order upon our 
globe,"— [Arcana of Christianity, part i, vol. i, p. 101.] 

"The World-Souls of the universe exist in pairs, male 
and female. They maintain a vast impersonal conscious- 
ness throughout the electrical natural spheres of the orbs to 
which they respectively pertain. The World-Soul of our 
own orb is feminine and its masculine counterpart is that 
of the planet Mars, through which it is supported in its 
fearful struggles at the present time." — [Arcana of Chris- 
tianity, the Apocalypse, chap. 2, par. 98.] . . . "The 
nature and the direction of the affinities of the World-Souls 
determine, to a large extent, the industrial and social har- 
monies of the human races. The grouping of the planets, 
in psychical relations growing out of these affinities, deter- 
mines the genesis of ideas in individuals." . . . "When 
the World-Soul is deranged or disturbed the disturbance 
and disadjustment of human society is inevitable, as it is 
through the World-Soul of each orb that the Divine har- 
monies are distributed." — [Arcana of Christianity, part 1, 
vol. 1, p. 103.] 

"The associations of the World-Soul determine the typal 
varieties of animals ; and new races and varieties of races 
will appear among us as the result of the disenthralment of 



Jacob Boehme 63 

our own World-Soul from the slavery of the hells. The 
origin of subversive instead of harmonic types of lower life, 
quadrupeda and reptilia, together with the unsolved prob- 
lem of the first cause of the state of universal antagonism 
which marked the ancient pre-Adamic periods of our own 
world's development, was in the magnetisation of the 
World-Soul of this orb, through the means of the inverted 
World-Sou! of that corrupted planet which has ceased to 
exist.." — [Ibid, p. 105.] 

" It may be objected that this view is false because Crea- 
tion belongs alone to the One Divine Spirit, and that all the 
wonders of nature are attributable to Him. There is here, 
however, no reality but simply appearance of difficulty ; 
subversive creations are Through the hells, but not from the 
hells, as a first cause. The ultimate form which a creation 
will assume depends upon the channels through which the 
creative influx shall descend in its approach to the plane of 
ultimates. If that influx, which is invariably Divine, is 
through mediums which have become perverted, an or- 
ganic perversion is the extreme result." — [Ibid, p. 107.] 

I wish to draw special attention to this saying about the 
magnetisation of the World-Soul, because I think it points 
to a hitherto un worked vein of knowledge. The every-day 
marvels of magnetism, animal magnetism as it is called, 
will give us, 1 believe, something of a key to the mystery 
of evil. To all who think, I conclude it is a mystery ; most 
of all, one would suppose, to people who regard the idea 
of a spiritual tempter as an outworn superstition. But if 
there is no powerful adversary behind the scenes, urging, 
prompting, and alluring to evil practices, how are we to 
explain conduct which opposes every instinct of self-in- 
terest ? If human weakness accounts for much crime, it 
leaves much more that is laborious and self-restraining un- 
accounted for : the delusions of vain women, of world- 
worshipping men, have more the effect of cruel bondage 
than of self-indulgence. Now if we examine the curious 



64 Jacob Boehtne 

process by which a magnetiser induces in his patient every 
feeling which he wills to establish, and the completeness 
of consequent sensation in that patient, I fancy we may be- 
gin to understand how it is that men and women believe 
they will find happiness in an evil course, and success in 
habits which must land them in ruin. 

In the sixth chapter of the first part of Boehme's " Treat- 
ise on the Incarnation," from the first to the sixth para- 
graph there is a wonderful description, if I understand it 
aright, of the process of biologising a mind reduced to a 
perfectly passive state in the case of Adam. I hope those 
who can refer to this will do so. No quotation in part will 
do justice to his meaning, but this much I must cite : after 
saying that Adam " lay as dead but was not dead, but the 
Spirit stood still," it is said that " all whatsoever the starry 
heaven bringeth forth stood magically in the mind as a 
looking-glass on which the Spirit of this world ga^eth ; " and, 
"when the earthliness wrestled with Adam, and that he 
imagined thereinto he became instantly infected thereby." 

Now the earth with its animals, birds, fishes, etc., — out- 
come, as I suppose, of the delegated powers of Spiritu 
Mundi — had* according to Mr. Harris, been infected by the 
mighty Spirit of a superior orb, and man coming to this 
world was open both to a direct and indirect magnetic in- 
fluence adverse to that of the Holy One ; for he drew his 
animal soul from the World-Soul, and this was already in 
partial subjection to the dethroned angel whom man was 
created to supplant — and if the teachings of some wise 
seers does not mislead — in the long reaches of eternity to 
restore, at the time of which St. Paul spoke, when God 
shall be all in all ; when as Hahn naively observes, evil 
cannot remain in any thing or any being. 

"The poor soul is poisoned through a false imagination, 
and through its own compression of its desire to come to 
be such a hungry fire-source, which is only a shutting in of 
the true life." — [Boehmeon the Testaments, chap. 2, par. 4.] 



Jacob Boehme 65 

" Now the Spirit of this world is by the devil's kindling 
and poison, which he hath darted thereinto, become per- 
ished (i.e., corrupt)," — [Incarnation, part 1, chap. 11, par. 

2..] 

Are not these expressions as apposite to a man or wom- 
an whose wrath or malice drives on to murder as to a mag- 
netised subject who is told he cannot move, or that the 
cold is intolerable while standing in the heat of a crowded 
room ? There is the same " compression of the desire" on 
a fixed imagination, the same " shutting in of the true 
life." And so long as the delusion is not one that sub- 
jugates our own will and imagination we can look on 
amazed and feel the truth of those Bible words, " he that 
committeth sin is the servant of sin ; " and where the 
Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty ;" but when we receive 
into ourselves the devil's poison how confident we are of 
our view of facts being correct ; and so is the victim of a 
controlling magnetiser, till "the hard compression of the 
false magnetic desire is broken in sunder, and opened in 
that manner as a man strikes up fire." — [ Treatise on the 
Testaments, chap. 3, pars. 7, 8.] 

Now Boehme further tells us with reiterated emphasis 
that the kingdom of phantasy is the peculiar appanage of 
the fallen angel of light ; that "Lucifer hath willed to domi- 
neer in the might and properties of the central, fire, viz., 
in the changing and phantasy." — [Fifth Tbeosophic Ques- 
tion, par. 6.] 

If anyone who reads this has the good fortune to pos- 
sess his treatise on the "Election of Grace," let it be re- 
ferred to for most curious information as to what he means 
by this kingdom of phantasy ; in chap. 4, par. 100, to the 
end of the chapter, the fullest account of this will be 
found. In chap. 6, par. 31, he says: — "The kingdom of 
phantasy grasped after Adam, and would be manifested in 
the image of God." 

This no doubt was the triumph aimed at by the envious 
rebel ; to rivet the imagination of man by any means was 
5 



66 Jacob Boehme 

enough for his purpose, for — " Every imagination model- 
eth only its like in itself and manifesteth itself in the simili- 
tude." — [Incarnation, part 2, chap. 4, par. 9.] 

But — "The Spirit of God goeth with the willing into the 
soul, it desireth the soul ; it setteth its magia towards the 
soul; the soul need only to open the door." — [Ibid, part 
3, chap. 5, par. 8.] 

The brief mention of the World-Soul by two other writers 
will complete my consignment. Madame Blavatsky says : 
— "The Astral Light, or Anima Mundi, is dual and bi-sex- 
ual." . . . "It is the life-principle of every creature, 
and furnishes the astral soul, the fluidic perisprit to men, 
animals, fowls of the air, and every thing living." — [Isis 
Unveiled, vol. 1, p. 301.] 

"The Anima Mundi proper was considered" (by ancient 
philosphers of whom she was speaking), "as composed 
of a fine igneous and ethereal nature spread throughout the 
universe, in short — ether." — [Ibid, vol. 1, p. 317.] 

Eliphaz Levi describes it thus : — "A natural and divine 
agent, bodily and spiritual; a plastic, universal medium; a 
common receptacle of the vibrations of movement, and the 
images of form ; a fluid and a force that one might call in a 
certain sense the imagination of nature. By means of this 
power all nervous systems secretly communicate with one 
another ; from it arise sympathy and antipathy, from it 
dreams, and by it the phenomena of second sight and su- 
pernatural visions are produced." 

" Un agent natural et divin, corporel et spirituel, un 
mediateur plastique universel, un receptacle commun des 
vibrations du mouvement et des images de la forme, un 
fluid et une force qu'on pourrait appeler en quelque mani- 
ere l' imagination de la nature. Par cette force tous les 
appareils nerveux communiquent secretement ensemble ; 
de la naissent la sympathie et 1'antipathie ; de la viennent 
les reves ; par la se produisent les phenomenes de seconde 
vue et de la vision extranaturelle." — [ Introduction de I'His- 
toire de la Magie," p. 19.] 



LOOKING GLASSES 

" Now 1 know very well that 1 shall not only in part be, as it were, dumb 
or obscure to the desirous reader, but also tedious, and he will be somewhat 
troubled at me." — [ Boehme's' Three Principles, chap. 5, par. 12.] 

Undoubtedly I shall be tedious too, if from no other cause 
than that of frequently interpolating quoted words, but as 
my object in writing this is to put into intelligible shape 
the instructions I have gathered from teachers little read, it 
would be as foolish to apologise for quoting them so often 
as to express regret that pearls were threaded upon a string. 
The string is of no use or value, apart from drawing those 
pearls together into combined beauty. So of these attempts 
of my mind, which has been honoured with this use by the 
Giver of all good ; and I am not going to neglect my own 
proper mission, however humble, in order to assume that 
which belongs to minds of higher calibre and more original- 
ity, therefore perhaps less free to seek out, and admire, and 
set in order treasure which has already been laid open to 
those who could seek and find, but do not. Because no 
one comes forward to remind contemporaries of all the 
wealth buried in the writings of Boehme and Swedenborg, 
offering proofs and samples, it is my misfortune, not my 
choice, to be driven again and again, by my ardent desire 
that this should be done, to try and elucidate subjects quite 
too large for my grasp. If any one with adequate intellect- 
ual force would deal with them — presupposing equal famil- 
iarity with those writings — how it would rejoice me! For 
I am convinced that if Boehme and Swedenborg held that 
place in our Universities which they ought ; if they were 
studied as Plato and Aristotle have been studied, Atheism 
and Materialism would be regarded by all intelligent people 
as the gross blunder of ill-informed minds. That must in- 
evitably result from an unprejudiced study of the works of 



68 Jacob Boehme 

these two great seers ; distinguished above all other teach- 
ers for having united intensity of love for God with know- 
ledge inexhaustibly profound. Their writings are pervaded 
with a love equal to all the most ardent pietists can feel or 
desire to feel, and in those writings the most searching in- 
tellect (if but cognisant of its previous ignorance, and 
teachable) will find itself led on from one depth to another, 
till it rests from all the wearying uncertainties of modern 
thought, and begins to see that the permitted embodiment 
of the human race in its present fallible condition is com- 
patible with Omniscient Love, and that all the woe and sin 
which now appear unconquerable will be made to evolve a 
yet larger purpose of Divine mercy in ages to come. 

It is Boehme alone who can satisfactorily answer the 
taunt implied in a sentence such as this that happened to 
meet my eye in a recent number of the World's Advance 
Thought. Its drift is one of the commonest jibes against 
Christian faith, and is uttered on all sides as unanswerable ; 
as indeed it is by theologians. 

"Omnipotence applied to God must be a misnomer, or 
everything in which power is inherent is a part of God." 

Briefly to intimate how Boehme solves this paradox, one 
may paraphrase that saying thus: "White is a misnomer 
for what we call whiteness, since it includes every colour." 

Instead of accepting the help these wonderful mediums 
transmitted to us, by dint of labelling one with the title of 
fanatic, and on the strength of that title neglecting what 
he wrote; and adding an ism to the name of Swedenborg, 
and turning his vast science into the narrowness of a relig- 
ious sect; we have disparaged both, and effected what the 
enemy of souls must strongly desire, the consecration and 
maintenance of darkness. 

It is real grief to find thoughtful people poring, year after 
year, over a number of modern views of evolution, while 
Swedenborg's "Angelic Wisdom concerning Divine Love 
and Divine Wisdom," and Boehme's "Sixth Epistle," 



Jacob Boehme 69 

which meet every requirement for harmonising difficulties 
on that subject, remain unstudied. When, after reading 
infusions of Darwin in recent literature, I open either of 
those works, I find my despair at human perverseness 
taking expression in the outcry of Solomon, " Wherefore 
is there a price in the hand of a fool to get wisdom, seeing 
he hath no heart to it ?" [Prov. xvii, 16.] * 

In the Visions of "M. A. (Oxon)" this passage occurs : 
" I want to ask whether those scenes are real — real, I mean, 
in the same sense as scenes in our world ? 

" In precisely the same sense. The scenes of the world 
of spirit, and the surroundings of the spirit in any sphere of 
of its existence, are just as real as are the scenes and sur- 
roundings of your earths. Each is impressed upon your 
own spirit ; each is the result of your own state. They 
would not be real to you in your present state ; they were 
real to you in spirit as you visited them, just as these scenes 
are not real to us." 

And again referring to another, the seer asked, "Can 
you give me any message about that vision?" and the 
answer was, " ft was not a vision but experience." These 
last words I have italicised as what most impressed me in 
that wonderful record. They set me thinking, very im- 
pertinently a metaphysician might have said, had he known 
my thoughts, for the first was that a direct assertion like 
this, coming from the source it did, was worth more than 
all the intricate theories of Kant regarding objective and 
subjective perceptions, which according to the jesting old 
story, he complained, "no one was able to understand, 
except Fichte, and he misunderstood." 

1 If the question, " How can evil have arisen in a world called into existence 
by a God wholly wise, loving, and all powerful ? " really disturbs the peace 
of any person rich enough to spend money on winning an adequate answer, it 
may be found, so far as a finite intellect can supply it, in a treatise by Diony- 
sius Freher, on " Deity considered as manifesting Himself through Eternal 
Nature." A very scarce work, but no doubt money could obtain it — in trans- 
lation, and to reprint it would be a noble beneficence. 



70 Jacob Boehme 

Do I then presume to understand the rationale of this 
simpler doctrine, that every spirit forms its own realities — 
not its phenomenal perceptions, its own delusive views of 
things only — but its surrounding facts, real as well as ob- 
jective to itself? By no means; but putting together this 
statement of it, and several hitherto dark sayings of 
Boehme's — which for years have baffled my efforts to un- 
derstand — I think I see a glint of a great law, valid in every 
world, which finds its best elucidation in the structure of 
looking-glasses; and by this word Boehme designates it. 
The requisite for every looking-glass is arrest of light at a 
certain distance from its source; audits office the giving 
back of objects which stand above or before it; on its 
smoothness and purity depends the accuracy of their out- 
lines. Now as limitation is thus essential to conscious- 
ness, it is in that sense that he says, "The spirit is the life, 
the looking-glass is the manifestation or revelation of the 
life, else the spirit would not know itself." — [Treatise on 
the Incarnation, part 2, chap. 1, par. 43.] And having in 
the next chapter to that in which these words occur given 
most profound insight as to the relations of the Wisdom, 
i.e., "the passive essence of divine operation " to Deific 
will, he continues: "The will in the looking-glass of the 
Wisdom discovereth itself, and so it imagineth out of the 
Abyss into itself, and maketh to itself in the Imagination a 
ground in itself, and impregnateth itself with the imagina- 
tion out of the wisdom." . . . "for, the will be- 
cometh impregnated with the glimpse of the looking-glass." 
— [Ibid, chap. 2, pars. 5 and 7.] 

Parenthetically I must here observe that it is such pas- 
sages as these, and many others susceptible of the same in- 
ference, which led Martensen and some English students to 
the hasty conclusion that Boehme's teaching involves a be- 
lief of the Supreme Creator first becoming self-conscious in 
His creations. If they would add on that plane of self- 
manifestation, I could entirely agree with them ; but to sup- 



Jacob Boehme 71 

pose God to be only completed by and in the creaturely 
life seems to me quite foreign to Boehme's thought, so 
much so as to have prevented him from guarding his ex- 
pressions from misprinting in many passages — virtually ex- 
cluded from his doctrine by others — such as these: " God 
is in Himself the Abyss, viz., the first world, of which no 
creature knoweth anything at all, for it standeth solely and 
alone with spirit and body in the Byss or ground. Thus 
also God Himself in the Abyss would not be manifest in 
Himself, but His Wisdom is from eternity become his 
ground or Byss." — [incarnation, part 2, chap. 3, pars. 24 
and 25.] Now the Wisdom is antecedent to the creation 
of our universe. Even if careful study of all Boehme wrote 
had not led me to the same conclusion, Freher's verdict on 
this point would be final with me; for he, who had read all 
his books ten times through, sums up the question thus: 
" If there is in the first world before and without Nature no 
perception, knowledge, etc., then there is also not only no 
Wisdom, but no God in no sense and manner; " and after 
examining arguments for accusing Boehme of ''defining 
God as potentiality alone, which requires the aid of nature 
before it gain life, reality, and power of its own" ( I use 
Martensen's words for the indictment) Freher says: "This 
explication, I grant, is plausible if looked upon from with- 
out superficially, for Boehme's own words do plainly say all 
these things; and if there were but that one and true 
distinction observed between the eternal generation without 
nature, and the eternal manifestation in and through nature, 
nothing more could be desired." 

It is because God does, in Boehme's phraseology, "only 
find Himself in man" on this earthly plane of Divine action, 
that until human nature is purified enough for His image to 
emerge from its troubled, turbid depths, the earth cannot 
be covered with the glory of the Lord. "The first Adam 
was contrived, or imagined, out of the light's essence, and 
substantiality," — [Incarnation, part 1, chap. 12, par. 26.] 



72 Jacob Boehme 

Boehme says, and the restoration of that image is only to 
be effected by the same process. 

We now find our souls darkened, and to escape from 
that darkness which solar light cannot relieve for more than 
a hundred years at the longest, we must will to regain 
light. '* A will is no substance, but the wills' imagination 
maketh substance." That is the awful law of nature. "The 
mind is the wellspring where the one only will can create 
out of it evil and good, which is done through imagination 
or through representation of a thing that is evil or good. 
And so is the property of that thing become of the same 
property in the life. The life's property catcheth or re- 
ceiveth the property of the thing represented, and kindleth 
itself therewith in itself " . . . "all according to the 
represented substance: whatsoever the imagination caught, 
that it introduceth into the mind." — [ Third Point, chap. 4, 
pars. 7 and 8.] 

Here we have, only at greater length and in fuller light, 
a reiteration of the fact that in man also " the will becometh 
impregnated with the glimpse of the looking-glass" i.e., 
with suggestive enticements to any subject on which the 
human mind can turn its attention. For as man was des- 
tined to be the "looking-glass of the Deity," sols all in 
this world a looking-glass for man, relatively speaking, a 
passive which can reflect upon his will every image which 
his desire — imagining — can impress upon it. 

The enchantments we may work upon ourselves by this 
law of our nature, are often quite as gratuitous as the 
shapes and faces which a sick person's eye can trace out for 
pastime in every object before it, in wall paper, folds of 
curtain, or hang of clothing thrown aside; in forming these 
we have no accomplice, and the slightest movement breaks 
the illusion. But the great sorcerer has legionary servants 
who can only see into our life through the mind of man, 
and well they know how to occupy that magic glass with 
a phantasmagoria to the tastes of each. 



Jacob Boebme 73 

We each form our own looking-glass, it is true, and see 
everything there of inner or outer world, as it is seen by no 
other eye, for every object mirrored there reflects some- 
thing which self has added or deducted from images of 
surrounding life. Nevertheless, it is constantly liable to 
cross lights, and to being tinted by other colours than our 
own "soulish fire." And with every change of these, and 
every new refraction of the light of truth, "the image in 
the spirit becometh altered, all according to what is con- 
tained in the will which the soul hath framed or contrived " 
. . . " viz., according to the imagination." — [Seventh 
of Forty Questions, pars. 18 and 19.] 

When Franz Baader says, "Jede Wille bringt seine Vision, 
mit dieser seine Lust und List damit," ( Every will brings 
its own seeing and with this its pleasure and its craft,) 
one's first thought is that the seeing is an arrangement of 
that will's cunning, made to secure its pleasure. Indirect- 
ly it is so, but not consciously. We often say with im- 
patient surprise, " I cannot make him or her see so and so! " 
— glaringly evident to the speaker. In very many cases no 
human power could alter the mental perception of another; 
because the constant interaction of the reflex images in the 
mirror of the mind, and the spirit which has im massed them 
there, precludes the sight of actual facts as involuntarily as 
the breath of a person shut up in a small glass house would 
obscure the passage of light and obstruct the captive's vis- 
ion. We are all prisoners v/ithin the magic circle of our 
own unconscious spells. The will has created images that 
suit its desire, and the images have corroborated the will. ' 

The momentary fury of irritation which will flare up in a 
narrow or despotic mind when its prejudices are contro- 
verted is solely due to this. No one likes to have his own 

1 This is no new truth of course; long since well-worded by Fichte, 
"Solttest du anders sehen so muessest du erst anders werden." (If you 
would see things differently you must first become different yourself.) But 
this one of the facts so habitually disguised in self-conscious life, that it needs 
to be repeated to every rising generation afresh . 



74 Jacob Boehme 

special looking-glass shaken, or its plane confused by im- 
ages foreign to those usually there. Hence the instinctive 
reserve of Englishmen: their fixity of opinion makes them 
impatient of every subversive thought. Nor can any im- 
ported ideas alter the proportions of our own. How often 
do we come from an audience with the inner thoughts of 
another — say, of a very conceited, very proud, or very 
melancholy friend — feeling as if we had been in contact 
with a mind partially deranged! Conceit has been in such 
comical disagreement with outside verdicts, pride so be- 
wildering blind, and dejection so wholly out of keeping 
with the cause alleged, and yet so intense and immovable. 
We wonder; but if our secret chambers of imagery had 
been inspected probably there would be quite as much to 
startle on some other line; and I think we should all guard 
more carefully against foolish wishes and vain or angry 
thoughts, if we knew how surely, when habitually allowed, 
they "compact themselves into the substance of the 
phantasy." — [Election, chap. 5, par. 25.] Whoever has 
long entertained one of these befooling fixed ideas must 
know not only their tormenting force but their fascination: 
for as Swedenborg so profoundly observed, "The objects 
flowed from the representations and not the representations 
from the objects." — [Spiritual Diary, vol. 3, par. 3672.] 
The slave of habit feels the truth of that, and still remains a 
slave. 

It is in perceiving how very much we all make the world 
we see that deepest disquiet arises as to the reality of any- 
thing. Amiel felt this when writing in his Journal Intime 
(vol. 1, p. 67): "We produce our own spiritual world, our 
monsters, our chimeras, and our angels; that which fer- 
ments within us we make objective. All is a marvel for 
the poet, all divine for the saint; all is great for the hero; 
all mean, ugly, and bad for the base and sordid soul. The 
bad man creates a Pandemonium around him; the artist an 
Olympus; the electa Paradise, which only each can see. 



Jacob Boehme 75 

We are all visionaries, and what we see in things is our 
own souls." 

Undeniable; but it is the appropriation of what in the ab- 
stract really is and not — chimeras excepted! — what does 
not exist. All those states of being are real in the soul, and 
with each we can so identify ourselves that we shall be 
cognisant of no others. This is the tremendous preroga- 
tive of man: his will, desire, and imagination bring into an- 
imate existence all that corresponds to their quest and, by 
intensifying their magic influence, blind him to any other. 
This has been neatly exemplified in a recent publication: 
" The other evening I looked up and saw over me a black 
sky. I supposed that the stars were hid. But I was stand- 
ing under an electric light. When I had walked on and 
looked up again, the stars came out. There is a man who 
is living under the light of his one science and it is honest 
white light. But in it he loses sight of the whole heavens. 
He needs to go further on in his life to widen the circle of 
his experience." . . . "He needs to step out from un- 
der his own blinding light in order that he may gain faith's 
larger vision." — [Newman Smyth's Christian Faith and 
Forces. ] 

We do all step out from under one light to another as 
time goes on; yet each generally blinds us in some degree; 
and our visions change as from time to time our looking- 
glasses become clearer or more dim and more warped by 
distorting modes of thought. Necessarily, too, imagination 
hungers for new delights; and phantasies — a more ephemeral 
brood by far — shift from year to year. We all prove in 
turn that "the universe is an infinite series of planes; each 
of which is a false bottom; and when we think our feet are 
planted now at last on adamant, the slide is drawn out from un- 
der us." — [ Emerson's The Preacher.'] How sharply and sud- 
denly sometimes! and what a heart-sickening process it is! 

Sooner or later every looking-glass, which reflects this 
world's image only, must break, and of the time inevitable 



76 Jacob Boehme 

when this befalls Boehme has such words that he must be 
quoted again: " Outward Reason supposeth when the out- 
ward eyes seeth a thing, that is all, there is no other see- 
ing more; indeed, it is bad enough when the poor soul 
borroweth the outward looking-glass, and must make shift 
to help itself only with that; but where will its seeing be 
when the outward looking-glass breaketh; wherewith will 
it then see ? ... It can see no other where. There- 
fore it often cometh to pass that when the poor captive soul 
descrieth itself in the inward root, and thinketh what will 
follow when the outward looking-glass breaketh, that it is 
horribly terrified and casteth the body into anguish and 
doubting. For it can nowhere discover where its eternal 
rest should be; but it findeth that it is in itself in mere un- 
quietness, moreover in darkness; and hath the outward 
looking-glass only as it were borrowed." — [Fifth Point, 
chap. 7, pars. 21, 22, 23.] 

He calls it borrowed because it was not that for which 
man was born; he was imagined by God into existence in 
the world of Light, and brought himself by his own imagi- 
nations into a nature which — until eternal light is generated 
in its soulish fire — is wrath and darkness. Nor can the soul 
of man embody itself in any lasting substance till it brings 
its desire into light and wills to be reborn. 

"In which world now it uniteth itself and giveth up it- 
self, from the same itgetteth substance in its imagination," 
[ Ibid, par. 29] and "out of the light the right or true sub- 
stantiality exists, for it is a fulfilling or satiating of the 
will." ' — [ First of Forty Questions, par. 278] 

I wish every reader of this paper could have access to the 

1 The reason of this may be better apprehended when the genealogy of 
water — principle of all corporeity — is remembered. From fire comes light, air 
from light, water from air; and from the quality of the fuel of the fire from 
which light proceeds depends the quality of resultant substance. There was 
profound spiritual fact, not only a figure of it given to us by The Light of the 
World when He offers the waters of everlasting life to the soul of man. Till 
that Light is kindled there its thirst is never quenched. 



Jacob Boebme 77 

context of the words just quoted from Boehme's Six Points. 
It is too long to give here, but at par. 38 a solution is 
offered to the all-concerning problem, how with debased 
desires and a perverted will is any soul to lift itself to high- 
er imaginings? and that must not be omitted. It can 
"often not know itself; it becometh oftentimes overwhelmed 
with the fierce wrath of evil and malignity; so that it is as 
if it were quite perished; and it were also perished if the 
" Looking-glass of the Deity " did not stand presented to it, 
wherein the spirit of the poor captive soul may draw breath 
and recover itself, and generate therein again. For, in the 
looking-glass of the light world standeth the incarnation of 
Jesus Christ presented to the soul's spirit; and the Word 
that becometh man, standeth in the sound, and is stirring; ■ 
the soul's spirit CAN therein draw breath or recover itself 
and anew generate itself, else it were often past help." 

It is here that the wisdom of the Father of Spirits comes 
into very striking contrast with the unwisdom of His 
child — in the modern thinker who declares an historic 
Christ to be too limited a conception for operative influence 
on the whole race. For when our philosophers cease to 
deny the possibility of Divine incarnation (Eastern Theoso- 
phy having lamed that cavil ), they still question the prob- 
ability of such an event on these two counts; first, that un- 
der such narrow limits of time and place a creaturely mani- 
festation of God must be inefficacious, and, secondly, su- 
perfluous, because, teaching being the main thing for amend- 
ment of a fallen race, a higher standard of ethics was all 
that was needed for its uplift. It is their assumption; but 
no teaching and no abstract ideal of virtue has ever told on 
human imagination with any constraining force. The life 
of the Saviour did — His enemies themselves being wit- 
nesses. It does still, as everyone knows who has become a 

1 That sentence, "standeth in the sound and is stirring," is one of the in- 
soluble little lumps of meaningless emphasis which seems to darken the whole 
context. It admits of every instructive explanation, which I hope to produce 
in a following attempt. 



78 Jacob Boehtne 

"new creature," who has won a spiritual life which has 
joy, hope, and ambition quite independent of all that death 
ends. In the chaotic confusions of a self-pleasing heart, 
the shadows of happiness which flutter past, and the ever- 
broken and ever-renewed images of pleasure that occupy 
for a while and sooner or later mortify — all produce weari- 
ness, often ending in despair. In such states a soul truly 
does not know itself; at one time it feels somewhat good, at 
another hard as iron, almost diabolical; and to give it an 
imagination of what it ought to be and could be, and must 
be if it is to find rest, is a boon of unspeakable worth. Be- 
cause an ideal of this sort is as essential to re-birth as some 
little point is for fluids to crystallise around if they are to 
form themselves into right angles. From Jacob's days and 
onwards, an image which strongly seizes on the imagi- 
nation always causes an attempt in some measure to repro- 
duce it, as surely as an echo gives back sound and still 
water the outlines of a figure raised above it. Till Jesus 
came to mankind in the flesh there was no picture of 
Divine love and tenderness in the human imagination. He 
brought that, as well as the undivided tinctures of fire and 
light, into the soul of our race. Who will dare to say that 
these two saving gifts were, as regards Time, simultaneous- 
ly bestowed ? When we talk of tincturing material things 
we often refer to a very slow process, and I suppose that 
the human soul began to be thus tinctured when Eve re- 
ceived the promise of victorious seed. When the Christ 
came ( ff in His creature, " says Boehme, " He is a man ") 
we must believe that the transmuting process had gone far 
enough for the basis of regenerative life to be evolved : the 
substance bought by the Holy One was then ready for the 
light of the risen sun of righteousness to quicken into or- 
ganic existence. This light permeating one's life from 
within, as it ever does, intensified the prenatal throes of 
eternal life, and in that anguish man was born again. Suf- 
fering is inevitable, if supreme bliss is to be known, for 



Jacob Boehme 79 

there must be a solution of all an evil will has framed into 
the "substance of its phantasy " before the image of God, 
Christ in us, can begin to renew itself in the soul. With 
his usual accuracy of similitudes, Boehme represents this 
when saying that a soul which imagines according to the 
dark world's property "loseth God's looking-glass: it be- 
cometh filled with dark, fierce wrath; as a man mixeth 
water with earth, and then the sun cannot shine in it, and 
that very water loseth the sun's looking-glass, and the wa- 
ter must again sink down from the earth, else it never be- 
cometh a looking-glass of the sun any more, but is capti- 
vated in the fierce, wrathful earth. Thus itgoeth also with 
the human life; while it imagineth after or according to 
God's Spirit, so it conceiveth or receiveth God's power and 
light, and apprehendeth God; but when it imagineth after 
or according to earthliness and the dark world's property, 
then it receiveth the essence of the earthliness and dark 
world, and filleth itself with the same. And then is the 
life's looking-glass shut up in darkness, and loseth the look- 
ing-glass of the Deity, and must be born anew." — [Fourth 
Point, chap. 6, pars. 25, 26, 27.] 

Now when the crisis of true conversion comes — be it slow 
or sudden — a leaping-up of spiritual light seems to shatter 
the compressed rubbish of our vain desires, and to purify 
the soul's vision from the foul dust of earthly-mindedness; 
but the will to convert must precede contrition, and the 
will to forsake sin is not always at our command; hence 
the mercy of a body, the soul's outward looking-glass; on 
this the weakest will can exercise some control; it can for- 
bid itself both word and deed, and so doing, little by little 
it gathers strength, and the imagination is purified; and as 
its turbid products subside, the example of the Holy One 
of God can shine in it once more. Then we begin to be 
able to fix thought upon that example by "such a strong 
importunate imagination of faith " [ Mysterium Magnum, 
chap. 2}, par. 32] that the soul "bringeth its magnetic 



80 Jacob Boebme 

hunger into God's love"; the soul then attracteth Divine 
substance, namely, the essential wisdom of God." — [Mi- 
crocosmus, par. 6.] 

That I may make more clear the difference in effect be- 
tween this process and that of any amount of philosophical 
thought or ethical belief, I will cite the other greatest seer 
on record, who, never having read any of Boehme's works, 
exactly agrees with him in many vital points. 

"The love which is of the will cannot be raised in the 
same manner as the wisdom which is of the understanding. 
The love which is of the will is raised only by shunning 
evil as sin, and then by all the goods of charity, which are 
uses, which the man therefore accomplishes from the Lord. 
Therefore if the love which is of the will is not raised at 
the same time, the wisdom which is of the understanding, 
however it may have ascended, still relapses to its love." — 
[ Swedenborg's Divine Love and Wisdom, par. 259.] 

This is precisely what happens to those deluded pietists 
whose religion is notional and not a life; and I fear we 
must one and all know, that our devoutest feelings have 
wings, used often as swiftly and suddenly as those of birds 
quitting a branch, and our mundane feelings all the close 
persistency of earth-worms, which never leave their line of 
action. Human nature is now averted from God, cleaving 
to the dust. "In God's holiness it cannot take hold; for 
the will was sent off from that; therefore there must now 
be a similitude wherein the imagination of the human nat- 
ure may take hold." — [ Boehme's Treatise on Baptism, chap. 
2, par. 33.] Now Jesus Christ is that similitude. 



THE IMAGE 

"The right true human essence lieth not in the outward man, it lieth within, 
for it was given to Adam in an image. But it is shut up and lieth in death, 
and cannot qualify or operate; and hath also no moving in itself, unless it be- 
cometh stirring in the power of the Deity." — [Fifth Point, chap. 8, pars. 2 
and 3.] 

If it may be assumed that ideas generate spiritual existence 
in higher spheres than this now occupied by mankind, and 
that, in this, congeries of spirits are attracted by mental 
figures which serve as a rallying point for their specific 
modes of operation, we are supplied with a theory that 
may well explain the deterioration so often observed in 
people whose leading ideas have undergone a radical change, 
and the worst change of all, total discredit after having 
been long held sacred: this has, 1 believe, been noticed in 
all countries where Christian doctrines have dislodged the 
hereditary belief of Mussulmans and Hindoos before their 
morals had been revolutionised : a process that must require 
more lengths of time than fervent missionaries like to be- 
lieve. Too often a baptised convert is a more unmendable 
rogue than he was before the little light of conscience he 
had was disturbed and the claims to his obedience un- 
doubted. When trying to extricate the essentials of re- 
ligious faith from tangles of gross superstition, it is hardly 
possible to leave the first uninjured in average human be- 
ings; but the ill effect of subverting old forms of belief, old 
habits of imagination and tricks of thought, is not at all 
confined to religious life. Sir A. Helps says, in one of his 
books, that ''when the ideas of a people are overcome, the 
nation is virtually conquered and will soon die out" (his re- 
marks bore upon the effect of Spanish conquest in America, 
among the many tribes who first resisted, and gradually be- 
come extinct, by no other modes of extermination). In 
later times the dying out of uncivilised peoples wherever 

6 



82 Jacob Boehme 

Europeans and European ideas have established themselves, 
may be due to this in great measure; and not only to new- 
ly-imported vices. 

It may seem a fancy, but I deem it to be a fact, that 
among ourselves declining health begins in not a few cases 
with the removal of old mental land-marks: for loss of con- 
fidence wherever it fails is a loss of vitalising energy. But 
why ? Because "a city divided against itself cannot stand." 
If caprice invalidates lasting affection, how much more 
must concentration of will be lost when frequent mis- 
givings disturb the ground of former assurance ? But how 
should this affect bodily health? Surely by scattering 
spiritual associates from whom comfirmation of faith and 
combined forces of will are unconsciously gained, as long 
as certain forms of thought are fixed and dominant. Swed- 
enborg affirms that if the spirits who make up man's life 
were suddenly withdrawn, he would drop down dead: that 
they often gradually withdraw we may well believe, as by 
his showing, they are changed according to the changes of 
man's ruling affections. These statements helped me to 
see a use, not perceived before I met with them, in the 
fixed ideas of weak and narrow minds; for they may serve 
their turn well enough : should we try to enlarge them, how 
often the fate of the fabled dog and the shadow might be- 
fall! an inadequate notion foregone, only a blank is made; 
what the mind had a firm grasp of, on Time's frail bridge 
is dropped; what shone fair in a larger reflection of Truth 
is beyond its feeble apprehension. Again, puerile details 
of religious observance may have higher use than we could 
suppose, while leaving out of thought their efficacy on the 
unseen side of worship: until we have learned — the last 
thing modern thinkers care to learn, — that the human mind 
has no solitary action, that it is in every attitude a leader 
for subordinate spirits, we shall never duly estimate the im- 
portance of all our habits in both inner and outer life. 

It is now time to report what has been my best reward 



Jacob Boehme 83 

for searching in Boehme's depths for the causative relation 
of form to spirit. Only those who have tried to make a 
clear pathway of thought to his meaning when he wrote 
of the image can appreciate the worth of my find. While 
trying to trace out the bearing of his axiom, " the figure 
has caused the spirit," the dense obscurity surrounding his 
use of the word image began a little to disperse. It remains 
to be seen if I can lessen it in other minds. 1 appeal to any 
docile reader of his books for assent as to the impossibility 
of understanding what he meant when referring to the im- 
age; in nine passages out of ten they seem to me even 
more baffling than those which bear upon "the Wisdom." 
But at last I have been enabled to see that for us they are 
more practically important. As no one will read this essay 
who is not a very determined student in Boehme's school 1 
feel at liberty to treat the subject with some thoroughness. 
I think everyone must recognise the curious inadvertence 
with which, when reading books hard to understand, the 
mind passes over sayings which answer to nothing already 
within its scope of vision; it is natural; flippancy in passing 
judgment after such imperfect study is often natural, too; 
1 fell into both these errors a few years ago, when saying in 
print {Light and Life, September, 1886, p. 22) '"'Why 
Martensen judged it suitable to speak of the Virgin Sophia 
as The Idea when All ideas of the Abyssal God, prior to 
nature and creature, are said by Boehme to have been re- 
flected in her, as in a passive mirror of the divine mind, I 
cannot understand." Though this mode of speech is ex- 
ceptional in all he wrote, to confess here my mistake rids 
me of a little burden of shame. Nothing can be clearer 
than these words of his "which spirit the Idea, Jesus, an 
efflux from the Divine Unity came to relieve" {Twelfth 
Theosophic Question, par. 25 ), and of course the inseparable- 
ness of the Word from The Wisdom is here implied, when 
Jesus is called an efflux from the Deity — the invariable def- 
inition of Virgin Sophia; but I had not noticed the sentence 



84 Jacob Boehme 

when criticising a writer who had. Remembering this, it 
is with diffidence that I offer the little I apprehend of the 
relation of the Idea to the image. 

A passage in "Nature's Finer Forces" will best explain 
my conjecture. When describing the origin of the sun, 
moon, and planets, Rama Prasad says, first that Prana, the 
lifecoil, is the shade of Manu, the atmosphere enlightened 
by the Logos. As the body in sunlight casts a shadow, 
"the suns are given birth to in this shade by the impres- 
sion of macrocosmic ideas into this shade; these suns, the 
centres of Prana, become in their turn the positive starting 
points of further developments. The mantis, throwing 
their shades by the intervention of the planets, give birth 
to the moons," (p. 79), so that according to him, the shad- 
ow of some object that intercepts light, becomes the first 
original of the transmitted light which proceeds instrument- 
ally from itself. 

Rather a new idea, is it not, to most of us, that the shad- 
ow of one orb lays the foundation of another ? Yet it had 
been implied as to other foundations by other teachers long- 
before. After saying that "the soul was not substantial 
but essential, and was apprehended where the fire origi- 
nated," Boehme adds, "but the shadow of itself hath fash- 
ioned itself into a figured image in the desirous will of 
God." [Of the Image of the Turba, par. 4.] In his 
literal translation of the first chapter of Genesis, Fabre 
D'Olivet gives this reading of verses 26 and 27: " And he 
said, the Gods, declaring his will, we will make Adam in 
the shadow of us." . . . "And He did frame out, He, 
the God, the self-sameness of Adam ( universal man ) in the 
shadow of His own. In the shadow of Him, the Being of 
Beings, He created him." 

By the help of Rama Prasad's words, quoted above, I 
can better conceive of the image to which Boehme attri- 
butes so much efficacy in the regeneration of the soul. 
Dwelling in the light from which all light derives, may not 



Jacob Boehme 85 

the Sun of righteousness, ''the first-born of every creature," 
have cast a shadow, which was the formative figure of the 
first Adam ? is the image, the shadow, the Idea ? To most 
readers this will seem too fanciful to be worth writing 
down, but what Boehme repeatedly asserts equally offends 
both reason and common-sense; this, that in every human 
soul an image is propagated, which, when substantiated 
by regenerate life, becomes "the true temple of the Holy 
Spirit, yea, even God in His manifestation and revelation 
of Himself." [Election, chap. 8, par. 240.] When trying 
a few years ago to find a place for this incoherent thought, 
a passage in Madame Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine struck me 
as possibly referring to the same unintelligible fact; it is 
curiously in agreement with Boehme's report, though 
given in such different terms. " Here we have the Word 
of the second Jehova and His face" (presence, as the Prot- 
estants translate it) " forming both but one, and yet being 
two; a mystery which seemed to us unsolvable before we 
had studied the doctrine of the Mazdean ferouers, and 
learnt that the ferouer was the spiritual potency, at once 
image, face, and guardian of the soul, which finally assim- 
ilates the ferouer. [Secret Doctrine, vol. 2, p. 479.] On 
the next page we read, "The ferouer is the spiritual count- 
erpart." Now when the image in the soul comes to life, 
the soul is represented by Boehme as regaining the "wife 
of his youth," spoken of in Mai. 2, 14, the divine woman- 
hood of Adam's androgynous perfection, until his treachery 
to her disqualified him for the heavenly consort and left 
him only fitted for an Eve. 

It is indispensable here to give Boehme's own words and 
with this much of preface; he frequently speaks of heaven- 
ly substantiality as if he only meant that in the abstract, 
though no one used to his writings can fail to see that by 
those words an organised corporeal vehicle for the indwell- 
ing spirit of God is often signified, "Seeing that the soul 
in the beginning of its creation was clothed and adorned 



86 Jacob Boehme 

with this heavenly substantiality, and it was the soul's 
right inward body, and that the soul in Adam is gone forth 
with its imagination from this substantiality, whence that 
substantiality is become again shut up in death, viz., in the 
still nothing, and the soul is entered with its imagination 
into the earthly kingdom, and nevertheless the first image 
which became shut up without the life, yet hangeth to the 
soul, but without its apprehension or understanding; there- 
fore now when the light of the soul becometh kindled 
again, and the heavenly substantiality, out of God's majes- 
ty, receiveth the life, viz., the light in the soul, then the 
dead substantiality becometh living in the light's power, 
and becometh with the now new introduced substantiality, 
one spiritual body, for it is of one only essence; and here 
death riseth up in Christ, here God and the inward man 
becometh one person. Understand it aright, this new 
light-life is Christ." [First Apology, part 2, pars. 373 to 
376.] And thus is Christ formed in us. This image "hang- 
ing to the soul " is the effaced, too generally the inopera- 
tive image of God; our birthright ever since the treader 
down of the serpent — the hydra-headed serpent of self-love 
— was promised; the image which can give to our soul's 
magically creative fire, the fuel that produces Heaven's 
light, and from the meekness of that light comes the water 
of eternal life which alone can make immortal bodies. 

11 Because it was a departure from the regular academic rules, 1 am afraid 
they will want to make learned Reason its judge." — [ Gichtel's Letters.] 

" Take pity of your life, and of your fair, heavenly image. Ye are God's 
children; be not the devil's." — [ 17th of Forty Questions, par. 28.] 

Commenting on Genesis iii, 15, Boehme says: "In that in- 
spoken word the poor soul obtained breath and life again ; 
and that inspoken voice was in the human life as a figure 
of the true reflex image."-— [ Election, chap. 7, par. 46.] 

All that has been discovered about voice figures gives a 
significance to these words, which will not, I hope, be 
overlooked. 



Jacob Boehme 87 

It is impossible, I think, to escape the conclusion that our 
souls have perceptions of which the mind can take no 
cognisance. "I must say," Plotinos wrote, "that the 
whole of our soul does not enter the body, but that some- 
thing of it perpetually abides in the intelligible world, and 
a part in the world of sense." . . . "We do not know 
what happens to either part of the soul until it reaches the 
whole of the soul." — [ Descent of the Soul, part 8.] 

Assuredly any quickening of desire for man's long-lost 
glory, from seeing its faded image, does not come within 
range of present consciousness. But how many physical 
processes persist within us unperceived: is it likely when so 
many vital transactions in a flesh and blood body are in- 
scrutable that those of our spiritual life should be less 
secret ? l 

Blinded as we are by the specious powers of reason, we 
are slow to imagine that anything of importance can hap- 
pen in our inner world unknown to what we call ourselves; 
as little can we believe that a number of subordinate spirits 
act in that hidden sphere, building up the existence which 
we suppose is all our own. Such ideas are scouted as un- 
reasonable: they are so, but that does not prove them to be 
untrue; our rational senses being as limited on their own 
plane as those of the body are on another. Even science 
accepts as momentously certain, what its most learned 
professors ridiculed as absurdly unreasonable twenty years 
ago. 

Boehme teaches that on every level of creation, nature, 
as a derivative of eternal nature, has similar laws of action, 
however diverse the factors by which those laws are carried 
out. Now, as we know that in surface life a plan or out- 
line serves in the construction of every material work, it 
seems possible that the formation of the spiritual body goes 

1 Those purer or interior forms which are inscrutable, are what form and fix 
the internal senses, and also produce the internal affections. — \ Arcana Ce- 
lestia, 4224.] 



88 Jacob Boehme 

on according to a pre-existent design; and that for the re- 
covery of true human creatures this image of it is engen- 
dered in every child of man as naturally as other instincts 
of the race. Inherited aptitudes, as we know, may long 
remain dormant or overborne by stronger impulses, yet 
without becoming extinct, so with the Heavenly image 
while animal passions and worldly cupidities predominate, 
it must remain lifeless, as Boehme admits, "in truth with 
most it is so," for " Man now lieth shut up after his fall, in 
a gross, deformed, dead, bestial image; he is not like an 
angel. . . . His paradisaical image is in him as if it 
were not, and it is also not manifest." — [Signatura Rerum, 
chap. 8, par. 47.] 

Any tolerably advanced student in Boehme's neglected 
school will not need to be told how this image is first 
brought to life and then to its full evolution in heavenly 
substance; but a brief recapitulation of his account of this 
process may be welcome to others, the more so as it is 
identical with what he teaches about the organisation of 
man — as a creature. 

The idea of the deific mind in that beginning was seen 
in the wisdom; ? it was impressed on the human mind af- 
ter the severance of the divine and human nature in man; 
and henceforward born in all mankind. If that image 
rouses the will to desire its fulfilment, the will involves its 
concentration of desire in that image. Hence what Boehme 
calls the astringent form of nature, contracting ; next re- 
sistance to that restraint — mobility ; the conflict of those an- 
tagonistic forces causing ceaseless unrest till the fire of life 
breaks out (the involved spark of soulish life, i.e., will), 
and this gives life to the meek munificence of light with its 
resulting vibrations of sound, which doubtless aid in form- 
ing the substance of that perfect creature that, when fully 

1 Where the word is, there is also the Virgin or the Wisdom of God; for the 
world is in the Wisdom; and the one is not without the other, or else the 
Eternity would be divided. — [ Threefold Life, chap. 6, p. 78.] 



Jacob Boehme 89 

evolved, manifests the purpose of God in the previously re- 
vealed image. This summary is what one might call Boeh- 
me's account of creation by the seven forms of eternal nat- 
ure in the abstract: by a very other line of instruction, not 
excluding, but involving with practical counsels this bare 
outline, does he teach how " the first Adamical image of 
God may again appear; and become seeing, hearing, feel- 
ing, tasting and smelling." — [Epistle /, end of par. 16.] 

Instruction not to be epitomised in an ephemeral page for 
the hasty glance of an unconcerned reader. His epistles are 
accessible in reprints for but a few shillings, and in the first 
of these, all that may not be cast before a careless public is 
impressively opened to an attentive mind. The dangerous 
and ignorant doctrine of salvation by imputed merits, by 
any efficacy of the blood of Christ external to the soul, is 
powerfully impugned in this epistle; and without any ob- 
scurity comparatively speaking, it proves that " out of man's 
willing must God's spirit become generated; it must itself 
become God in the willing spirit, or else it attaineth not 
divine substantiality." — [Incarnation, part 2, chap. 10, par. 

Applying this to the inanimate image in the human soul, 
we can understand that unless the will of man desires its 
restoration to life it cannot become a living, breathing 
creature, and how truly it was said by J. Pierrpoint Greaves, 
that "the creative process is neutralised by contradictory 
emotions." 

For the animal soul and its astral associates creaturely ev- 
olution is secured by nature — an organism good for a term 
of years, usually ; or as our friends, the modern Theosophists 
say, for many recurrent periods of time. But time has be- 
ginning and end; the human soul neither; and being a fire 
spark out of God's might, no effect of man's will can be 
only negative; it is inalienably at his own disposal, to sur- 
render to good or evil; and by yielding habitually to evil, 
he forges his own fetters. Even when not earnestly aim- 



90 Jacob Boebme 

ing at goodness he is incurring future results which no wise 
thinker could leave unconsidered. For by the habitual bent 
of his will and desires now, he forms his future external 
appearance. Let him think to it. "The image in the 
spirit becometh altered all according to what it contained 
in the will which the soul hath framed or contrived." — 
[Seventh of Fourth Questions, par. 19.] 

Who would willingly enter the world of spirits, where 
disguise is impossible, disfigured, monstered by diseased 
imaginations and loathsome grovelling tastes ? Such souls 
"will have lost the right and true image; what the daily 
lust and delight hath been, such will their image be." — 
[Ibid, question 30, par. 61.] 

Shameful, not human, appearance will not be the heaviest 
part of the penalty. Bodily form, as we all know, con- 
ditionates consciousness. In vain should we bring a dog, 
or cat, or ape, into a fine library or lovely garden, hoping 
to rejoice them; with their bodies they cannot even per- 
ceive what would delight a creature more perfectly organ- 
ised. God is Love, but his omnipotence could not make 
degraded animalised human beings sensible of angelic joys. 
It is not God, but man who, when leading an animal life 
shuts himself out of Heaven, for "Thy holy body must be 
regenerated if man's spirit would see God; otherwise he 
cannot see him except he be born again in the water of the 
holy element in the spirit of God ( who hath manifested 
himself in Christ with this same water source ) that his dis- 
appeared body may be made alive; else he hath no sense or 
sight in the holy life of God. — [Mysterium Magnum, chap. 
2, par. 21.] 

This is what is gained by assimilative union with the 
"noble image," heavenly consciousness. This the "figure 
that causeth the spirit " that can be one with the Christ. 
One more quotation from Boehme will explain the re- 
lation of the image to the soul more decisively, perhaps, 
than any other that could be selected. " The soul hath the 



Jacob Boehme 91 

seven properties of the inward spiritual world according to 
nature; but the soul's spirit is without properties, for it 
standeth without or beyond nature, in the unity of God, 
and yet becometh manifest through the soulish firey nature, 
in the stillness, for it is the true real express or reflex image 
of God, viz., an idea, in which God Himself worketh and 
dwelleth; so far as the soul bringeth its desire into God, 
and giveth itself up to the will of God. But if not, then is 
this idea, viz., the soul's spirit, dumb and workless; and 
standeth only as an image in a looking-glass, which dis- 
appears and hath no substance, as befel Adam in the fall. — 
[ Explanation of Tables of Three Principles. Microcosmos, 
par. 5.3 

It should be noticed here that Boehme's use of the words 
"the soul's spirit " in this passage implies what he has else- 
where fully demonstrated — that of the three souls which 
co-exist in man's nature only the first "out of the Eternity " 
outlasts Time. Both the animal soul and the astral soul 
have necessarily their spirit and their proceeding breath, or 
they could have no bodily organs; but the original soul, 
"the child of Omnipotency," is the only one in which the 
image of God can be revealed by that soul's spirit. Stu- 
dents of Boehme will find this a very needful difference to 
keep clearly in. view, as without it his various use of the 
terms soul and spirit leads to much confusion of thought. 



RESURRECTION BODIES 

In reply to " E. S. W.," as to what sources of information 
I possess regarding these, my answer is that from the 
Bible I gain the knowledge of faith, and that I have been 
saved from this being reasoned away by such knowledge 
of understanding as I am able to gather from Boehme. 
For other minds this might have no weight; to me it has 
been a revelation which brought rest to many perplexing 
thoughts. Some day I hope to deal with the subject at 
greater length, but that will necessitate many quotations 
from the Philosophus Centralis: too many, I doubt, for the 
patience of readers of Light. This in briefest summary is 
what I understand from his intimations. That at the time 
of the general resurrection, all earthly fixities of state will 
be dissolved and every force set free. That the laws of 
spiritual affinity will then be irresistible and every magnet 
will draw its own natural adherents. Of all creaturely 
formations Boehme said: " The magnetical attraction is the 
beginning of nature," — [Election, chap. 2, par. 41.] — the 
same creative law will rule when to the spiritual body a 
body in ultimates is restored. Not, of course, by the re- 
vivification of corrupt corporeity, but by the return of un- 
dying powers previously involved in its perishable matter. 
These, according to his report, are from the quintessential 
part of the earth from which the bodies of our race were 
evolved. At this point I must drop the clue of his teach- 
ing, from inability to justify my own deductions from it, 
without copious reference to the original text. What I sup- 
pose it to contain is this — that in our bodies — by their nu- 
triment both before and after birth, we unconsciously as- 



Jacob Boehme 93 

sume, and supply, naturing conditions to the comatosed 
spirits of a past /Eon fallen into a darkness even more pro- 
found than our own (as to spiritual light and life), and that 
these form in every human body a constituency which is 
disbanded at death. Some of these as temporal spirits be- 
ginning in time may end when the body is returned to 
earth, but those which had an earlier origin, having taken 
influence for good or for bad from the central spirit of man, 
have a future before them; escape from the baser ingredients 
of mortal flesh and blood certainly : but between the time of 
dissolution and the time of magnetic attraction to their old 
leader, even Boehme gives not the faintest hint of what 
that future is. Only on one certainty he insists: "All 
things enter again into that whence they proceeded." — 
[Signatura Rerum, chap. 15, par. 42.] 

"Everything entereth with its Ens into that whence it 
takes its original." — [Mysterium Magnum, chap. 22, end of 
par. 7.] 

It is interesting to know that "the ancient Egyptians be- 
lieved that the life atoms of the mummy did, notwith- 
standing the embalmment, keep on for three thousand 
years to throw off invisible mites, which at the end of this 
time would again come together for a one-ment into a new 
body, for the man in whose service they had formerly 
been. — [ Philangi Dasa's ' Swedenborg the Buddhist, p. 61.] 

St. Martin has a mysterious saying to which my thought 
reverts when musing upon those discharged servants of the 
human will. " It is," he says. " in the earth that the sub- 
stance is prepared which serves for a basis and a first step 
to the reintegration, or to the new birth of all beings in the 
universe." (I cannot find chapter and page reference for 
this, but the words are his.) Further, our thought cannot 
follow, any more than it can on some other lines of occult 
history which we believe in none the less. These outgone 

1 Having seen the same statement elsewhere, I venture to quote it; though 
from a writer who could persuade himself that Swedenborg was a Buddhist. 



94 Jacob Boehme 

spirits, which build the perishable body they afterwards 
forsake, are not the only constituents of that which is re- 
formed at the general Resurrection : Boehme shows that 
man has in his measure a creative work: himself the re-out 
speaker of the Word, by whose breath all things come into 
existence, by the breath of his mouth, the unconscious fiat 
of his will, man also produces spiritual entities which are 
not ephemeral. Dr. Franz Hartmann puts this fact before 
his readers very clearly: "Man is a centre from which 
continually thought is evolved and crystallises in forms in 
the world of souls. His thoughts are things that have life, 
form, and tenacity; real entities, solid and more enduring 
than the forms of the physical plane. — [Dr. Hartmann's 
Magic, p. 139.] 

They differentiate and organise powers previously in- 
definite by the magic of an attractive focus; so at least have 
I read the riddle of "the figure causeth the spirit." For 
these, as the out-births of our own spiritual nature, we are 
responsible, and whether we believe this or not it is these 
that will return to their source, when all disguises and all 
artificial separating restraints fail in the terrible light of that 
day which will make the whole past of every human being 
a vividly present now. Analogy is not valid as argument, 
yet to my mind the received belief among Christians that 
redeemed souls will form the mystical body of Christ, not 
to speak of Swedenborg's Grand Man, formed of myriads 
of generations of human beings, goes far towards justify- 
ing the belief that each of these, when perfected, will be in 
like manner an organised host of spirits trained and made 
subject to the central spirit from which they took their di- 
rection. Though Van Helmont does not connect his ideas 
on this point with bodies reforming at the Resurrection, 
they so well express what Boehme's dark sayings have led 
me to believe, that I shall give here two quotations from 
his " Paradoxes " as an interesting enlargement of thoughts 
suggested already : 



Jacob Boehme 95 

"And because these out-going spiritual ideal beings are 
not mere spirits, but spiritual bodies and bodily spirits, as 
being born of the whole man, who consists of the soulish 
body and spirit, and that all these spirits have their original, 
out of and from the central spirit of man, viz., out of the 
heart, and are sent abroad as his messengers; must not, 
therefore, these messengers perform that which they were 
duly sent about, and go thither, whither the central spirit 
or will of man designs and aims them; and in like manner 
return by revolution to man again ? And must not there- 
fore the works of man follow him which he hath done in 
this lifetime, whether they be good or evil ? Especially 
seeing (as was mentioned before ) that new spiritual bodies 
go forth continually from man, which belong to him and 
contribute to the whole man, for to make out his full meas- 
use until that member which he supplies in Adam or Christ 
do attain to that perfection which suits with such a head, 
that so a perfect member may be joined to a perfect body, 
and a perfect body united to a perfect head ? 

"Must not also finally those spirits (as a great and well- 
ordered army under their captain general or Adonai Zeba- 
oth), and every least atom, after they have wrought out 
their revolution, return to man again and unite themselves 
with his central spirit, and so all these spirits being united 
with the central spirit, make up the whole man ? " [ On the 
Microcosm, p. 8.) "And forasmuch as the voice and 
word of man are his offspring and children, viz., his out- 
flown spirits and angels which continually, from the be- 
ginning of his life until his death, go out from him and 
make up the whole man. . . . and all his out-births 
area spiritual, endless, everlasting being, as well as he him- 
self is; how is it then possible that ever they should be 
separated from man, or that they should lose themselves or 
perish in the great world, which is man's mother, any more 
than a man is able to lose himself?" — [ Ibid, p. 63.] 

What one would like to know is how they are employed 



96 Jacob Boehme 

in the great world during their temporary separation from 
man. Upon that mystery neither Boehme nor Van Hel- 
mont offer any gleam of light. 



ETERNAL BODIES 

" Understand us aright what we mean; we speak the precious and sublime 
truth, as we know and understand it. The new man is not only a spirit: he 
is even flesh and blood, as the gold in the stone is not only spirit : it hath a 
body, but not such a one as the rude drossy stone is." — [ Boehme's Treatise 
on the Incarnation, part i, chap. 14, pars. 21 and 22.] 

Mr. Lockerby seems inadvertently to have blended ideas 
gathered from Boehme and Mr. T. Lake Harris. Such words 
as ''primates," "atomic forms," and "arch-natural" at 
once remind one of the Arcana of our great contemporary 
seer. They are not to be found in the writings of Boehme 
( his only use ot'arch in a qualifying sense is arch-shepherd ). 
Neither can I recall in them any mention of a magnetic 
body, though he says emphatically that "the magnetical 
attraction is the beginning of nature." — [ Election of Grace, 
chap. 2, par. 41.] 

But in claiming for him speciality of teaching as to the 
elaboration of an arch-natural body in the human frame, Mr. 
Lockerby is wholly right, and I thank him for drawing at- 
tention to that most important point, and gladly seize the 
opportunity for trying to make it a little clearer than it can 
be while embedded in very obscure context. According to 
Boehme the necessity of regeneration bears upon substance; 
not a new state of mind or feeling, but the heavenly body 
which the first Adam lost and which only the second — 
Christ in us — can restore. A new soul we cannot have; it 
is an organism suited to the soul's divine life that every 
child of man needs and cannot have without the "new 
creature " of the second birth. This he urges with im- 
portunate iteration, and he startles readers unused to his 
books by attributing to this new creature flesh and blood; 
here for instance, " seeing God hath created man in a sub- 
stance, to be therein eternally, viz., in flesh and blood; 
7 



98 Jacob Boehme 

therefore of necessity, to that willing which giveth itself up 
into the Eternal, must such flesh and blood be put on; as it 
was, when God created it in Paradise in the Eternal. 
Whereby then we clearly know that God hath not created 
us in such flesh and blood, as we now bear upon us, but in 
such flesh and blood" (those last words in his largest capi- 
tals) "as to the willing, in the new birth, is put on." — [In- 
carnation, part 2, chap. 6, pars. 15 and 16.] 

Unlike some of our modern seers, he could not flatter 
mankind with the hope of any other bodily existence be- 
hind the veil proving permanent, however real, pleasant, 
and lasting it may seem. He knew better. Listen to his 
earnest warnings as to this. 

"Thou art so weak in the outward life that thou canst 
not prevent thy constellation or Astrum, thou must go into 
the corruption or breaking of thy body, when the constella- 
tion leaveth thee. And there thou seest undeniably what 
thou art, viz., dust of the earth. . . . Thou livest to 
the configuration " (of the stars) "and elements, they rule 
and drive thee according to their property; they give thee 
employment and art; and when their seculum time or sea- 
son is run about, that thy constellation under which thou 
wert conceived and born to this world, is finished, then 
they let thee fall away. And then thy body falleth home 
to the four elements, and thy spirit which leadeth thee, to 
the mystery . . . thus must thou moulder away and 
become earth and a nothing, all but the spirit, which is 
proceeded out of the Eternal, which God introduced into 
the Limns: therein consider what thou art, even a handful 
of earth, and a source or quality-house or tormentive work- 
house of the stars and elements." — [Incarnation, part 2, 
chap. 6, pars. 33 to 38.] 

Boehme never denies that after dissolution of its outward 
body, the human soul may still live on in the astral body, a 
short or a long time according to the periods of the stars 
ruling over its mundane existence; but he affirms that soon- 



Jacob Boehme 99 

er or later this body must perish as the elemental body did 
before it, and leave the soul which has not attained to the 
new birth, or even to the " little thread of faith in the new 
regeneration, which holdeth the Saviour fast by that thread, 
though very weak, and setteth its imagination or desire 
further into the heart of God, " — [ Three Principles, chap. 
19, par. 42] l — " raw and naked," " without government " — 
in short, a will devoid of all executive power, a hunger for- 
ever famishing and insatiable. 

Among all teachers (I was going to say human teachers, 
but remembered how earnestly he protests that what he 
taught was revealed to him; that he was a medium for 
"that which the spirit showeth, which no man can resist" 

1 Boehme's account of the action of souls still clothed in an astral body after 
death will have, I fancy, intrinsic value for readers in Light, so I give one of 
his most graphic passages from the Forty Questions of the Soul: " Concern- 
ing the souls which have not yet attained heaven, which stick in the source, 
quality or pain in the principle in the birth, these have still human matters 
with the works on them, and they search diligently after the cause of their 
detention: and, therefore, many of them came again with the starry spirit, and 
walk about in houses and other places, and appear in human shape and form, 
and desire this and that, and often take care about their wills and testaments, 
supposing thereby to get the blessing of holy people for their rest and quiet. 
And if their earthly business and employment stick in them and cleave to them 
still, then, indeed, they take care about their children and friends; and this 
continueth so long, till they sink down into their rest, so that their starry 
spirit be consumed, then all is gorfe as to all care and perplexity, and they 
have no more feeling knowledge thereof ; but merely that they see it in the 
wonders of the Magia. But they touch not the Turba, nor seek what it is in 
this world, for they are once sunk down from the Turba through death; they 
desire that no more, neither do they take any more care, for in care the Turba 
is stirring; for the soul's will must enter with its spirit into earthly things, 
which it would fain forsake, for it hardly got rid away from them before; it 
would not cumber itself to let in the earthly spirit again. We speak freely and 
certainly that this sort do no more, after they have come to grace, purposely, 
take care about human earthly matters: but about heavenly matters which 
come to them through man's spirit, they see them, and have their joy there- 
in." — [Quest. 26, pars. 1 1 to 16.] — I put in italics three sentences in this quo- 
tation, that thus attention may be drawn to implied beliefs which I find full of 
comfort, and far more credible than theologically orthodox. 



ioo Jacob Boehme 

[ Epistle 3, par. 38] ) he is unique in revealing to us the pro- 
cess of regeneration, or rather attempting to do so. I use 
the word attempt with reference to the understanding of 
those who read him, for all the ideas he transmits on this 
theme are precise and consistent, invariably agreeing in 
purport though expressed in ever-varying modes of speech. 
It is not possible to give any adequate precis of these ideas, 
neither is this the place for them, but this much must be 
said: Mr. Lockerby's expression as to "placing ourselves 
en rapport with the Divine Man for Him to clothe with 
His body by causing the new creative law, evolved by Him, 
to operate from soul to body," is a long way distant from 
the account Philosophus Centralis gives of the indispensables 
for "the soul attaining the Eternal Flesh again." It reads 
like an accepted inference from pages in the Arcana of 
Christianity; for to judge by his writings Mr. T. L. Harris 
has never been intromitted to the same depths of regene- 
rative experience, and in his school one finds no recog- 
nition of the tremendous spiritual throes which are known 
to so many in the crisis often called conversion; many, I 
mean, of those who can give any date to a process of 
which, I am persuaded, not all in whom the new creature 
is forming are distinctly conscious. 

It may be that the opening of internal respiration, on 
which he lays such stress, is as necessarily preceded by "a 
death unto sin," as what we call the new birth. This is 
the " new creative law of the Divine Man," and inexorably 
binding; a prolonged dying of the false and evil will of what 
Boehme terms our "assumed selfhood;" and a constant 
mastery of the "gross phantastical sulphur" of our material 
bodies. These hold captive the imprisoned supernal light 
that forms an imperishable body in the water of eternal life. 
For the full emergence of this light not only must self-will 
die to its rights, but contrition must break open its prison ; 
and who can produce that at pleasure ! Surely not our own 
polluted hearts, too much used to their firstborn darkness 



Jacob Boehme 101 

to feel or even believe how thick that darkness is! And 
therefore in one of his prayers Boehme cries out "O great 
Holy God, I pray Thee set open my inwardness to me, that I 
may rightly know what I am ; unshut, I pray Thee, in me 
what became enclosed, and shut up in Adam." 

For Boehme and Mr. Mohini Chatterji are in full agree- 
ment as to the nature of the true human spirit. "Regen- 
eration," says this last, " is to be accomplished by Christos, 
the incarnated wisdom, the true human spirit," — [Frag- 
ments of Man's Forgotten History, p. 42] — and Boehme 
says, "The most inward ground in man is Christus; not 
according to the nature of man, but according to the Divine 
property in the heavenly substance, which he hath gener- 
ated anew." — [ Treatise on Election, chap. 7, par. 98.] 
Hence we can understand the two following clauses of his 
little creed about regeneration, formed, he assures us, "not 
from supposition or opinion, but from our own true know- 
ledge in the enlightening given us from God. First, that 
the new regenerate man which lieth hidden in the old as 
the gold in the stone, hath a heavenly tincture, and hath 
divine heavenly flesh and blood on it: and that the spirit of 
that flesh is no strange spirit, but its own, generated out of 
its own essence. ... . Sixthly, that the possibility 
of the new birth is in all men, else God were divided, and 
not in one place as He is in another." — [Incarnation, part 
1, chap. 14, pars. 51, 52 and 59.] 

One who had evidently gone through the great crisis of 
regeneration in a very other way than mere rapport with 
the Regenerator, describes it as "a re-organisation, a tan- 
gible luminous reality with every sense we have, but of a 
new essence. It is a whole constitutional change, not a 
change of state only ; " and he adds, " If the deepest ground 
is to be broken up, the deepest and darkest and bitterest 
sufferings must be suffered. The very soul's constitution 
is to be rended, — how can we expect the work to be got 
over without the deepest feelings of anguish." — [Unpub- 



102 Jacob Boehme 

lished MS. of J. Pierrepoint Greaves.] But such anguish 
is not known in anything like this degree to a great many 
sincere followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; — to many it is. 
Can it be that there has been in another prior existence 
what is equivalent to new birth? I cannot think it: the 
only alternative theory for my mind is that in these devout 
lives, unconscious of any of the pangs of rebirth, there is 
something that answers to impregnation of higher life, and 
that death to the flesh body may be literally the first bring- 
ing forth to embryonic perfection of the new creature so 
gradually and insensibly formed; possibly experiences that 
follow upon death. 

As to the arch-natural body being transmitted to children 
when it exists in both parents, I doubt if Boehme would 
admit that such an inheritance is possible — favorable tend- 
encies, but not the new creature. For "every angel and 
soul which will live in God's light and power must die to 
the selfhood of the fire's dominion in the desire" — [ Third 
Apology, text i, par. 60] — and the selfhood of the fire's 
dominion in the origin of earthly life. Every child brings 
it to manifestation here; and as St. Paul said, it is "first the 
natural, and after that the spiritual," because, though the 
one so little agrees with the other, in the natural body the 
soul has ability to form the heavenly — Boehme repeatedly 
asserts — as gold is formed in the matrix of its rough quartz. 
Mr. T. L. Harris gives a similar report of the luminous body 
being formed within the opaque, in one of his unpublished 
pamphlets; and in another, with a realism of his own, tells 
his disciple to "take care of the cell-germs of the present 
form, because the new-natural grows from cell-germs 
evoked out of the present ones." — [ Wisdom in Council, p. 
27.] 

As regards the arch-natural in the flesh enabling people 
to have "uncontrolled range of arch-natural senses," and 
to "see and handle spiritual forms," I should think it un- 
likely, but do not presume to have an opinion. Evidently, 



Jacob Boebme 103 

the inner senses — of the astral body as I suppose — have been 
very much quickened within the last century; and the in- 
habitants of an adjacent plane of being seem increasingly 
desirous to make us aware of their existence. Whether it 
is that the nerve body is better developed in our present 
generation, or whether the great judgment of spirits in 
1757, reported by Swedenborg, did, as he averred, rid the 
regions contiguous to our earth of a dense crowd of spirits 
who obstructed higher astral influences, able to reach us 
ever since that great clearance, we cannot of course decide; 
but this is certain, that a new consciousness of unseen 
agents spreads amongst us more and more in spite of all 
denial, regret, and ridicule. It often leads me to think of 
Boehme's prediction that at the time of the end ''the gates 
of all three Principles shall stand open." Are they not 
opening gradually now? So strange a mixture of the 
worst and the best spirit influences seems to be pressing up- 
on us, like a mixed multitude trying to get into an enclosure 
at every least opening. Such eager seeking for access to 
the soul of man is quite intelligible so far as the rabble of 
astral spirits go, because from regenerate man they can 
learn more than the world-soul can teach ( according to 
Boehme quite a degree lower in rank ). But what for them 
can be the attraction of the mass of human beings ? Is it 
not from eagerness to reveal some of their own peculiar 
knowledge? for "the stars," he says "have in them the 
causes of everything that is in this world: all that live and 
move is stirred up from their properties and brought to 
life." — {Threefold Life, chap. 7, par. 73.] And also "the 
outward instigation to manifest and reveal the mystery pro- 
ceeded from the stars, for they would fain be freed from 
vanity, and they drive mightily in the magical children to 
manifestation." 1 Well may he add, "Therefore we must 

1 Epistle 1 , par. 115. Here connection of ideas is wanted without knowl- 
edge of another doctrine of Boehme's, that until all the wonders the stars can 
pour out are opened by man, the illusions of time, the periods during which 



104 Jacob Boehme 

prove and examine the instigation whether it proceed from 
God's light, from God's Spirit, or from the dominion of the 
stars." 

It seems quite possible that as our astral senses quicken 
astral bodies may become evident, and their indwelling 
spirits audible associates; the great danger is that from our 
non-acquaintance with the true paradisaical body, we may 
mistake perishable astral glory for that in which the king- 
dom of Heaven may be seen — that only; and forming our 
soul's magical substance by this erroneous imagination find 
them at last divested even of this, and without eternal flesh 
and blood. 

To Mr. Lockerby's last question, "Can we follow Boeh- 
me in the spiritual law ?" nothing short of his answer can 
honestly be given. "Searching is not the chief or most 
special means to know or apprehend the mystery, but to 
be born or regenerated in God." — [Forty Questions, ques- 
tion i, par. 254.] 

If I have not already claimed too long patience with his 
doctrines from seekers of Light, I hope to be allowed an- 
other day to report his account of the seven-fold stratifi- 
cation of men in a man; about which he speaks, in one of 
his books, with almost as much exactness as an Eastern 
adept. 

That such a paper as this can be allowed in an English 
periodical may do something, I hope, to remove an aspersion 
coming from Mr. W. Q. Judge, in last month's number of 
the Theosophist. "How could European minds under- 
stand the statement that there may be an astral body and 
an astral shape also, each distinct from the other, when 
they have always known that body is a thing due to accre- 
tions from beef and beer ? " We have got a little in ad- 
vance of that! 

"the whole creation groans and travails," will not be brought to an end. 
Hence their interest in the " magical children " — query, mediumistic ? 



FORM 

" The beginning of every being is nothing else but an imagination o f the 
outflown will of God, which hath brought itself into separability, formedness, 
and image likeness wherein lieth the whole creation." — [ Treatise on Baptism, 
chap, i, par. 4.] 

When I began to see the result of any fixed persuasion in 
our entourage of spirits, I never guessed where that seeing 
would lead me. But it happened to me as it does to a 
child playing on open ground when his ball rolls off into a 
pathless thicket close by; though he is pretty sure to miss 
the shortest way out, and now and then to lose his footing 
in rough and tangled obscurity, yet he saw the ball enter, 
and at all risks will follow to try and find where it went to. 
I saw that a fixed persuasion is a permanent attitude of 
mind, that every attitude is a form and amounts to the same 
thing as a figure on the visible plane; and then as remem- 
brance of Boehme's saying, "The figure hath caused the 
spirit," — [Threefold Life, chap. 10, par. 13] — and Sweden- 
borg's that "Influx is according to form," — [Conjugial 
Love, par. 86] — flashed upon me, I suddenly perceived that 
some unvarying law of creative action was to be discovered 
on this ground. Plato's Ideas came to my mind, of course, 
and many a dark saying of Boehme's in which the use of 
the words idea or figure had been so without context in 
myjnind previously, that passages in which they occurred 
had, for me, been a dead letter. If now I can suggest any 
interpretation of these worth having, or even any gleam of 
light upon them leading to fuller illumination, seeming pre- 
sumption may be forgiven. The attempt is not made be- 
cause I think myself equal to it, even in my best days, but 
because if I do not do what little I can now, I shall never be 
able to share with other seekers, finds — in my judgment — 
most precious; and it may be long before another student 



106 Jacob Boebme 

has had leisure and inclination for thirty years' quarrying 
in Boehme's works. This qualification is mine. 

In par. 4 of his twelfth Theosophic Question he says: 
"The original of all things lieth in the idea." 

In answer to his fifth Theosophic Question — all most in- 
structive on this theme — par. 4, we read: "When God 
would have such an Idea in living creatures . . . then 
He moved and severed the central fire of the Eternal nature 
whereby the Idea is become manifest in the fire which is 
done through the breathing," and a few sentences before, 
"The central fire of the Eternal nature, wherein the sub- 
stance of the creature standeth." (How is substance to be 
accounted for therein ? thus— all fire that is kindled enough 
to give forth shining light, produces first air from thence, 
and from air water distils; water is potential corporeity.) l 

It should be remembered that in Boehme's language the 
" fire of God " and " the wrath of God " are equivalents for 
nature in our world, and the light that outshines from nat- 
ure's fire is not wholly originated by nature, for "in the 
light are the powers of the not-natural life manifested," — 
[ Election, chap. 9, par. 45 ] — but out of light, he tells us, 
no creature could be formed; for naturing there must be 
fire, that which is always consuming and producing simul- 
taneously. We see, therefore, why the central life of the 
Eternal nature was moved in order that the ideas of the 
Divine mind should be manifested. 

In many places in Boehme's writings, we shall find him 
insisting on the same laws of nature ruling on highest*and 
lowest planes, and this among others, that as in the mind 
of man a form or model of what it desires to effect must 
precede every acting out of the will, so in the " Wisdom " 
of God, and so in the world-soul it has ever been. It is in- 
teresting to see how exactly Madame Blavatsky's account 

1 If anyone should demand of us what properly a body is, we say that a 
body is a tangible birth of the water, differing in shape and quality according 
to the power and activity of its former life. — Van Helmont. 



Jacob Boekme . 107 

of the creation of man tallies with Boehme's as to this: 
"The Dhyan Chohan creates man in his own form; it is a 
spiritual ideation . . . that form is the ideal shadow 
of itself; and this is the man of the first race." — [Secret 
Doctrine, vol. 2, p. 242.] 

"The first race was composed of astral shadows of the 
creative progenitors, having, of course, neither astral nor 
physical bodies of their own." — [Secret Doctrine, vol. 2, 
p. 121.] "The Father of Nature," Boehme wrote, "hath 
continually compacted the substantiality in the mystery" 
( by mystery understand a chaos of potentialities ), " where 
it hath formed itself, as it were, into an image, and yet hath 
been no image, but as a shadow of an image." — [Incar- 
nation, part 1, chap. 1, par. 54.] 

My object is to show how that shadow of an image tends 
to creaturely existence, and in the attempt Boehme's track 
must be closely followed. 

" The will is no substance, but the willing's imagination 
maketh substance." — [Ibid, part 2, chap. 2, par. 23.] 

"The will maketh out of itself the form of a spirit, and 
the form maketh a substance according to the property of 
the spirit." — [Fourth Point of Six Great Points, chap. 6, 
par. 10.] 

" It figureth the willing into a form or shape, wherein we 
understand the centre of the spirit." — [Apology, vol. i, 
part 2, par. 493.] 

Without Boehme's key to the last sentence what a total- 
ly unintelligible paradox that seems. One can hardly im- 
agine words more senseless than "a shape wherein we 
understand the centre of the spirit," the centre of what we 
are used, in our ignorance, to think of as essentially inde- 
pendent of form! Yet with Boehme's key, we shall find in 
these words a most precise compendium of his revelations 
concerning the origin of all living creatures. To prove this 
a considerable digression is necessary. It is vain to try to 
give Boehme's meaning with any evasion of the fact, that 



108 Jacob Boebme 

as soon as one level of understanding is reached another yet 
deeper is perceived. But on the other hand, if once clear 
intelligence is gained of any obscure part of his teaching, 
light will break out from that part more and more, and 
show such unforeseen agreement of assertions of his (previ- 
ously seeming to lack point) with what iiltle we know of 
the mysteries of nature, that conviction grows upon us of 
his having been used by a Divine teacher as a medium. 

It is impossible, I think, to render his account of what 
the Wisdom is — in which, by the Word, all that was first 
created came into existence — with any words as clear as 
his own in the following passage: "The word is the speak- 
ing or breathing of the willing. . . . The Wisdom is 
the outflown word . . . the substantial power of the 
great Love of God ... a passive substance of Divine 
operation." — [Explanation of Table of Three Principles, 
par. 28 and 29.] Now, if content with this as all we can 
learn of the Divine Originator, Boehme's frequent reference 
to the Mysterium Magnum will be a baffling patch of su- 
perfluous unintelligibility. Let us therefore heed his own 
definition of it in a small treatise, in which he seems to 
touch the most profound arcana accessible to man. In the 
fifth of his small book of Six Points he says that the Magia 
is "the original of nature ... no other than a will, 
and that will is the Mysterium Magnum . . . the great- 
est hidden secret, for it is above nature and maketh nature 
according to the form of its will. It is the fountain of the 
Divine Wisdom, viz., a desire in the Number Three, what- 
soever the will-spirit openeth in it, that it driveth into a 
substance through the harsh astringency which is the fiat, \ 
all according to the model of the will. As the will doth 
model it in the wisdom, so the desiring Magia receiveth it 
in." So we have to think of the Mysterium Magnum as the 
desirous activity of the Deiflc will to realise ideas in the 

1 " The desire is the Fiat which has made something where nothing was but 
only a spirit." — [Clavis, par. 75.] 



Jacob Boebme 109 

passive efflux of Deity — the Wisdom. ' Invited by Boehme 
to believe in a close analogy between the Divine and hu- 
man mind, we can think of the ideas in the Wisdom as 
answering to such as we entertain in thoughts: so soon as 
we will to bring these to actuality, the concentration of de- 
sire is the magic that effects our creaturely word. We 
utter oroutbring acts; the word of God produced creatures. 
Now every definite purpose is, as such, a limitation of in- 
definite powers; as we say, it fastens the mind on a point. 
" If there be a speaking, then the power must first con- 
tract itself that it may breathe forth itself; and then it be- 
getteth that comprehensive magnetic impression, viz., the 
something (which is the beginning) wherein the fiat which 
attracteth the powers is understood." — [Four Tables of 
Divine Revelation.'] Thus does the form or shape prove to 
be the centre of the spirit; the idea is the shape into which 
the will contracts itself with desire to bring that idea to 
ultimation ; and with that contraction of the will the evo- 
lution of a self-conscious and embodied spirit begins; for 
"not substantial, but figured spirits without corporising 
have been from eternity." — [ Nineteenth of Forty Questions, 
par. 10.] Spirit must form some kind of embodiment be- 
fore its self-consciousness can begin. "Out of the sub- 
stance the true intellective spirit primely proceedeth, which 
before the substance is only a will, and not manifest to it- 
self; for the will doth therefore introduce itself into sub- 
stance and essence that it might be manifest to itself." 
— [Mysterium Magnum, chap. 4, par. 9.] "Out of the 
spiritual form the corporeal form is generated," — [Three 

1 Anyone seriously bent on understanding all that Boehme has revealed 
about that most mysterious Being the Divine Wisdom, should read, not once 
or twice, but repeatedly — some interval of time between each reading — the 
second and third chapters of the second part of his treatise on the Incarnation. 
Of course, pride and sloth would tempt with the thought that it is a subject 
unfathomably obscure. But so are logarithms, until they have been studied 
long enough. It is only adequate interest which is wanted for standing long 
enough under the weight of obscurity to be rewarded by growing intelligence. 



i io Jacob Boehme 

Principles, chap, n, par. 17] — and as the spiritual form 
alters, so does its bodily exponent. " Being the first Adam 
had fixed his imagination in the earthliness, he is become 
earthly." — [Incarnation, part 1, chap. 10, par. 11.] 

The result for the race is a predominating sense of phys- 
ical conditions. Boehme draws one of his most powerful 
arguments for securing regeneration before death from the 
certainty that sooner or later life-sustaining forces, both el- 
ementary and astral, must fail for mortal bodies, and when 
the last dies the spirit's outward "looking-glass" is shat- 
tered and no possibility of an altering consciousness re- 
mains, only what the magical will reproduces from the 
past with hungry, insatiable desires. Unless the new creat- 
ure of heavenly flesh and blood is in some degree of life, 
there can be no consciousness of any other good than what 
the poor soul has groped after here. "The soul hath no 
image or body which remaineth eternally, unless it be 
through Christ regenerated out of its first substantiality. . 
. . In the time of the earthly life it may alter its will, and 
then the fiat altereth the figure, but after the dying of the 
body it hath nothing more wherein it can alter its will." — 
[Apology, vol. 1, part 2, pars. 265 and 267.] "It is in 
this sense, as indispensable to conscious self-disposal, that 
Boehme calls the outward world of every inward life a 
looking-glass: "Every form maketh substance in its de- 
sire .... and hath its seeing in its own looking- 
glass. Its seeing is a darkness to the looking-glass of the 
other. — [Points, vol. 2, par. 13.] There are, we know, 
many planes of consciousness besides that of the body, and 
each one makes what he terms the "looking-glass of the 
imagination." "That is a looking-glass wherein the will 
beholdeth itself what it is, and in that beholding it becometh 
desirous of that substance which itself is, and the desiring 
is a drawing in." (Ah, yes.) " The will draweth itself in 
the desiring and modelleth itself in the desiring for what it 
is. That very model is the looking-glass wherein the will 



Jacob Boehme 1 1 1 

seeth what it is, for it is a similitude of or according to the 
willing." — [Incarnation, part 2, chap. 1, pars. 36-40.] 

Now, if the human will were long bent on one form of 
desire, these looking-glasses would not be the brittle, dis- 
appointing things they are. We complain of the treachery 
of hope; but there is a worse traitor in the camp, the per- 
verted will which seeks happiness in every other direction 
before it turns to the only source of any lasting joy. 

Imagination occupies the mean between the existence endowed with, and 
existence deprived of, reason, between spirits and matter; it serves them as a 
medium and thus unites the two extremes: that is why its nature cannot be 
easily seized with exactness by the philosopher. — Synesius. 

All images do make something that is subsisting and substantial, but above 
all the images which Elohim conceiveth within Himself. — [Van Helmont's 
Notes on Genesis i , v. 26.] 

In Lucifer for October, 1891, there is an artical on " Heat, 
Sound, and Consciousness," in which one sentence, "a 
study of heat as will power," might lead students of Boeh- 
me to recognise a mind on the right track in one of the 
most profound mines of hidden knowledge. By his own 
original line of thought, Mr. T. Williams comes to con- 
clusions which very nearly coincide with some that the old 
seer had asserted centuries before. This, for instance, 
"Will is an energy whose unique direction is always to- 
wards self-perception, so that the reflection on the material 
plane is that of work directed into its own centre. But 
this is the distinctive characteristic of the effect of gravity, 
which is therefore common to every atom composing our 
own globe, because it is the result of the impress of the 
nature of will (as an impulse to self-perception) in all its 
agglomeration of partial activities. — [ Lucifer, October, 1891, 
p. 102.] Boehme with less brevity expresses the same 
truth thus: " Every will hath a seeking to do or to desire 
somewhat, and in that it beholdeth itself and seeth in it- 
self, in the Eternity, what itself is: it maketh to itself the 
looking-glass of its like and there it beholdeth itself what 



1 1 2 Jacob Boehme 

itself is, and so finding nothing else but itself, it desireth 
itself." — [First of Forty Questions, par. 22.] "It brings it- 
self into a Reception of itself, and compresses itself to some- 
thing, and that something is nothing but a magnetical hun- 
ger, harshness like a hardness, whence even hardness, cold, 
and substance arise." — [Clavis, par. 70.] Of this self-ex- 
ploring will Boehme says, "The Eternal unity hath breathed 
forth itself out of itself that a plurality and distinct variety 
might arise, which variety hath induced itself into a pecu- 
liar will and properties; the properties into desires, and the 
desires into beings." — [Sixth Epistle, pars. 8 and 9.] It is 
that "peculiar" will which makes creaturely existence. 
The "magnetical impression is" thus "the beginning of 
nature," for "by the desire substance is sought, and in the 
substance the desire kindleth the fire," — [ Third Point, par. 
45 ] — and thus beings derive from desires, and desires from 
properties, — and properties? "The original of all things 
lieth in the Idea, in an eternal imaging." — [ Twelve Theo- 
sophic Questions, par. 4.] In Boehme's revelations this is 
an ever-recurring statement, though variously worded: 
" All spirits are created out of the eternal mind." — [ Three- 
fold Life, chap. 4, par. 31.] "Whatsoever the eternal mind 
figures in the eternal wisdom of God and brings into an 
idea, that nature frames into a property." — [ Clavis, par. 58.] 
And we may well ask what did he mean here by nature ? 
So far as I have been able to follow him, he attributes to 
what Fabre d'Olivet describes as "the fathomless contin- 
gent potentiality of being," — [Fabre d'Olivet's Translation 
of Genesis, 1, v. 2, in his Cosmogonie de Moyse] — a latent 
imagination stimulated to activity by the ideas thrown up- 
on its depths; as outlines just seen may lead an artist to 
elaborate a perfect picture. 

"Thus we understand the substance of all substances, 
that it is a magic substance, where a will can create itself 
into an essential life, and so pass into a birth, and in the 
great mystery awaken a source "... and thus also 



Jacob Boehme 1 13 

apprehend whence all things, evil and good, exist, viz., 
from the imagination in the great mystery, where a won- 
derful essential life generateth itself. — [ Earthly and Heaven- 
ly Mystery, text 5, pars. 37 and 38.] 

It may well be asked why, when deeply learned Theoso- 
phists, such as Messrs. Subba Row, Mohini Chatterji, Rama 
Prasad, and Madame Blavatsky, have given our Western 
world copious and precise teaching about cosmic formation 
and mighty primordial beings who effected it, with such 
masterly lucidity of style as to make it impossible to say 
that they wrote what cannot be understood, I should pre- 
sume to approach those themes with obscure fragments of 
arcane knowledge, selected from Boehme's books and load- 
ed with the uncouth verbiage of his day ? 

If knowledge was all I drew from them it would indeed 
be folly to do so. As to that, no one can feel more than I 
the greatness of our obligation to those modern instructors, 
for enlightenment and information not to be gained from 
any other source. But hard as it often is to understand 
Boehme, the teaching he gives to heart and conscience is 
never doubtful, and helps me far more than theirs, precious 
as it is to the intellect, because it always bears upon the 
spiritual fate of man, whether in the past, present or future; 
on the originating causes of his position now, and the tre- 
mendous alternatives which hang upon his choice here. 
However far he may seem to wander from these main 
lines, they underlie all he wrote. His many reiterations of 
the same occult truth, urged by intense desire to give the 
others what he knew to be of inestimable value, secure for 
patient readers impressions that can hardly fail to affect 
conduct: in these there is no obscurity, however clumsy 
the vehicle which conveys them — to the inner man. The- 
osophists adopt what was called of old the Wisdom Re- 
ligion. No doubt it was a well-deserved title before "grace 
and truth came by Jesus Christ," but when compared with 
His later revelations one great defect stamps them with in- 



1 1 4 Jacob Boehme 

sufficiency. Humility is not inculcated, and without that 
neither wisdom nor peace is possible for human beings. 
Recommendations of this virtue may be implicit in the 
literature of Eastern Theosophists, though of these no trace 
appears in English versions of it; nor does it seem possible 
that a religion excluding any idea of a Personal God (i.e., 
one who responds to human conceptions of such a God) 
should admit humility to its list of duties. Of love to all, 
Buddhistic teaching is eloquently full, but as Gichtel said, 
"Humility is the throne of love";, unless that throne is 
firmly established, love is quickly deposed by every spasm 
of self-will. That the Divine Man Himself is meek and 
lowly was a discovery no human wisdom could have made; 
it was first declared by Him Who came in the fulness of 
time to be the Saviour of all men, even of Theosophists, 
who believe that they need no redeemer, and scout the offer 
of pardon as childish and irrational. 

Apart from intellectual gain, I think Theosophy must be- 
come popular, when every bond is resisted; requiring 
neither submission nor obedience, it exactly suits the in- 
subordinate temper of our day. 

If it were honest to evade difficulties when professing to 
try to lessen them, I would not notice a sentence quoted 
just before this long digression, "The imagination in the 
great mystery," because it is only one sample of a most in- 
explicable part of Boehme's doctrine. Again and again he 
refers to imagination as that by which everything in the 
universe has been caused to exist. I help myself dimly to 
interpret this by what little is yet understood by hypnotic 
methods, of the injection of forms of thought by one mind 
strongly imaging what it wills should effect the imagination, 
into that of another. To this process he attributes the fall 
of Adam into material conditions: after saying that the earth 
was corrupted by its former ruler, and that Adam was sent 
to restore it, Boehme goes on: — "God forbade him the 
false lust, which the devil stirred up through the limus of 



Jacob Boebtne 115 

the earth, in Adam's outward body with his false imagi- 
nation. — [ My sterium Magnum, chap. 18, par. 18.] 

"The devil opposed man in his enkindled envy, and in- 
sinuated his venomous imaginations into the human prop- 
erty." . . . "Whence Adam's imagination and earn- 
est hunger did arise that he would eat of the evil and good, 
and live in his own will." — [Ibid, chap. 17, pars. 36 and 

39-1 

The expression, "insinuated his venomous imaginations," 
might have puzzled any philosophical reader some years 
ago before the famous hypnotic experiments in France gave 
a degree of notoriety and credit to their results never at- 
tained by the similar discoveries of Dr. Darling and Mr. 
Braid 1 some forty years sooner, though, under the name of 
electrobiology, they had both fully proved the power of in- 
ducing states of sensation by the control of the operator's 
will. But now even scientific men are obliged to own that 
this is done, and strain their intelligence to find out how. 
They would scorn to learn of Boehme; yet he told centu- 
ries ago precisely what Oriental Theosophy had announced 
ages before, that- all which seems to be is the work of im- 
agination, the effect of Maya, "the veil that is spread over 
all nations." He assures us that "all things are arisen 
through the Divine imagination and do yet stand in such a 
birth." And he copiously declares the momentous fact that 
human spirits determine their fate by what they imagine 
(observe that this is but an enlargement of the thesis, "the 
figure hath caused the spirit.") It need scarcely be added 
that the direction of such a magical power by a right will, 
is the only safe-guard against being infested by a stronger 
one, desiring, and therefore imagining, our sympathy on 
dangerous lines to which the weaker nature is seen to tend. 

Nothing ever gave me such a lasting fear of leaving this 

1 The late Mr. James Braid, of Manchester, first applied suggestion to the 
treatment of disease, the patient being previously put into a state resembling 
deep reverie, artificially produced, and which he called hypnotism. 



1 1 6 Jacob Boehme 

life unpurified as Swedenborg's account of the cruelties 
practised by evil spirits on others, amenable to their diabol- 
ical arts from having been servants to sin while in the flesh. 
In his " Spiritual Diary" he records the process of torturing 
by hypnotism exactly as it has been done and observed on 
this side of death. Those among us who are wont to speak 
of hell and its despots as the dream of old-world supersti- 
tion, would do well, I think, to reconsider their verdict by 
the light of modern science. What has perplexed me with 
regard to Adam and his dethroned enemy, is the doubt 
whether in that case the paralysis of true vision was effect- 
ed by one great being subduing and then binding the mind 
of another, as one World-soul is supposed to influence an- 
other, or whether as usual, the single name indicates a race, 
which yields in detail to the seductions of adverse hosts. 
This, however, is of no practical interest: we know well 
enough that for every human being unseen promoters of 
sin abound. But it is far less commonly known that our 
own imaginations affect all that concerns us so strongly, 
that giving, or having given, to us a different idea of what 
we are, will often cause radical change of character. 

Probably the belief that he or she is a reprobate, hope- 
lessly subject to bad habits, as firmly rivets their chain, as 
the remark (or annoyed consciousness) that one seems to 
be in a bad temper makes it difficult to feel otherwise for 
the next hour or more. This makes snubbing almost crim- 
inal, and to encourage people about themselves, as much as 
sincerity allows, a duty we owe to the public. 

Christian scientists seem to have a juster sense of the im- 
measurable force of imagination than most of us entertain, 
only, as it appears to me, they antedate the time of its re- 
lease from penal fetters. In the world of spirits, will, we 
are clearly taught, makes all the surroundings of the spirit, 
and as its state alters, so will every object in view: just as 
it now is in our minds ; their eyes 

" See all around in gloom or glow, 
Hues of their own, fresh borrowed from the heart." 



Jacob Boehme 1 1 7 

But in the mind and in the spirit-world all is homogeneous. 
Not so in the world we now occupy, for our bodies are 
here in their own element, our spirits are but "strangers 
and sojourners." The spider can weave its delicate web 
wherever it will in the light atmosphere in which it was 
born; falling into a basin of gum it would be as impossible 
for it thus to energise, as it is for a Christian scientist who 
denies the reality of pain, because it is unspiritual, to ignore 
the torment of toothache or sciatica — when felt. 



BOEHME AND RAMA PRASAD 

As there is a nature and substance in the outward world; so also in the in- 
ward spiritual world there is a nature and substance which is spiritual, from 
which the outward world is breathed forth and produced out of light and 
darkness, and created to have a beginning and time. — [Regeneration, chap. 
2, par. 31.] 

There is only one life, and this is not capable of being created, but is emi- 
nently capable of flowing into forms organically adapted to its reception — all 
things in the created Universe, in general and in particular, are such forms. — 
[Swedenborg's Intercourse of the Soul and Body, No. 1 1 .] 

No habitual student of Boehme's works could study Rama 
Prasad's work on Nature's Finer Forces without noticing 
the agreement of account given by both these writers of 
many reccndite facts. With point of view quite different, 
and diction most unlike, each confirms the evidence of the 
other: but they give two sides of the same phenomena, 
Boehme the spiritual, Rama Prasad the supersensuous ma- 
terial. Take, for example, the often recurring mention of 
"the powers, virtues, and colours of the wisdom " (efflux 
of Deity), by the old seer, and what we find about the 
varying colours of vibrations of ether ( tatwic phases ) in 
pp. 42 and 57 of the modern book. Calling to mind Boeh- 
me's frequent assurance that everything in temporal nature 
has its analogue in eternal nature, close attention to such an 
admirable teacher as Rama Prasad should help to a clearer 
conception of the mysteries Teutonicus laboured so earnest- 
ly to expound. I think "desirous seekers" after truth 
must always be pleased when one mystic or seer endorses 
the report of another. For instance, Boehme teaches that a 
figure — a passive model — has invariably preceded the origi- 
nation of creaturely life, whether emanating from divine or 
from spiritual beings, and these are the words of Rama 
Prasad: " It might be said that all formation on the face of 



Jacob Boehme 1 19 

our planet is the assuming by everything under the influence 
of solar ideas, of the shape of those ideas. The process is 
quite similar to the process of wet earth taking the impres- 
sions of anything that is pressed upon it." (p. 137.) To 
those who have not seen this valuable book — almost given 
away at its very low price — this much of its tenor must be 
offered to make further comparison intelligible. The great 
Breath of Life acting upon undifferentiated cosmic matter, 
"divides itself into five states, having distinctive vibratory 
motions, and performing different functions." (p. 1.) "Of 
the five sensations of men each of these ethers (tatwas) 
gives birth to one, ' the evolution of these tatwas' (five 
modifications of the ' Great Breath ') is always a part of the 
evolution of a definite form." ( p. 19.) "Thus form can 
be perceived through every sense: the eyes can see form, 
the tongue can taste it, the skin can touch it, and so on. 
This may appear to be a novel assertion, i but it must be 
remembered that virtue is not act. The ear would hear 
form, if the more general use of the eye and skin for this 
purpose had not almost stifled it into inaction." (p. 94.) 
The identity of Boehme's doctrine about the Breath of 
God and those of Eastern Theosophists is too striking to 
need indication, but the following coincidence might be 
easily overlooked. One of his most frequent sayings is 
that the effect of the first form of eternal nature is to darken 
previous light by a concentrated desire to manifest the im^ 
agination of a spirit Thus in one passage, "we ought to 
know from whence darkness originateth: for in the Eterni- 
ty, without or besides nature, no darkness can be . . . 
for there is nothing that can afford it. We must only look 
into the will and into the desiring, for a desiring is an at- 

1 In his essay on the Sublime and Beautiful Burke broached the theory 
that the perfect roundness of every granule of sugar caused the sensation of 
sweetness. It is quite thirty years since I have seen the book, to which I 
have not now access, and I forget whether it was salt or acid to which he at- 
tributed sharpness of taste from acute angles in their atoms. 



120 Jacob Boehme 

tracting, and whereas in the Eternity it hath nothing but 
only itself, it attracts itself in the will, and maketh the will 
full, and that is its darkness." — [ Forty Questions, question 
i, par. 9.] 

Rama Prasad having already said that the colour of the 
Akasic Tatwa is black, and that that is the first vibration 
in evolving Prana, i.e., soul— be it the cosmic or the human 
soul — says also, "Certain measured portions of the solar 
akasa naturally separate themselves from others, according 
to the differing creation which is to appear in those por- 
tions." (p. 23.) 

Again, the initial vibration is called by him the "sono- 
riferous ether," and Boehme, after mention of the seven 
forms of nature, says of the first, "That which proceeds 
forth in essence according to the properties of the will, is 
dark and causeth a strong pulsation, which is a cause of 
the tone or sound." — [Signatura Return, chap. 14, oar. 17.] 

With regard to the colours, his account differs from Pra- 
sad's in that he admits green and excludes black. As to 
this I must give his own words: "Here meeteth us the 
great secrecy which hath from Eternity lain in the mystery, 
viz., the mystery with its colours, which are four, and the 
fifth is not peculiarly belonging to the mystery of Nature, 
but it is the mystery of the Deity which shineth in the mys- 
tery of Nature, as a life of the light. And these are the 
colours wherein all lieth, viz., blue, red, green, yellow; and 
the fifth, the white, is God's own, yet also hath its glance 
and lustre in nature. The black belongeth not to the mys- 
tery, but it is the veil, the darkness wherein all lieth." — 
[ Earthly and Heavenly Mystery, text 7, pars. 65 and 66.] 

( Mystery, it will be remembered, is used by Boehme in 
the sense of a chaos.) 

He repeatedly warns us that nothing happens in our 
present life without leaving ineffaceable impressions — that 
they will outlast both it and time. "The multiplicity of 
things come into one again, but the figure of everything re- 



Jacob Boehme 121 

maineth standing in the one only element." — [ Threefold 
Life, chap. 5, par. 122.] 

"The figure and shadow continue eternally, as also do 
words, both the evil and the good, which were here spoken 
by a human tongue; they continue standing in the shadow 
and figured similitude." — [ Three Principles, chap. 9, pars. 
21 and 22.] 

What we read in Natures Finer Forces (p. 122) of the 
Cosmic Picture Gallery exactly agrees with these state- 
ments. The old seer affirms that it is so — the modern, how 
it is so. 

On one very interesting point the agreement of these two 
seem to me inferential, though not fully proved. When 
Rama Prasad begins to tell us about the origination of 
mind — Manas, his term for it — he writes: "Virat is the 
centre and Manu the atmosphere. These centres are be- 
yond the ken of ordinary humanity, but they work under 
similar laws to those ruling the rest of the Cosmos. The 
suns move round the Virats in the same way as the planets 
round the suns." (p. 91.) "The composition of the 
h anu is similar to that of the Prana. It is composed of a 
still finer grade of the five tatwas; and this increased fine- 
ness endows the tatwas with different functions." (p. 91.) 

If we turn to p. 69, to see what the laws regarding Prana, 
which rule the Cosmos, are, we read, "The planets each of 
them establish their own currents in the organism . . . 
the real tatwic condition of any moment is determined by 
all the seven planets, just like the sun and the moon." 
This the disciples of Boehme will readily believe; but un- 
less I greatly mistake, I think they would say that he often, 
directly or indirectly, refers to constellations higher than 
any our solar system includes, as influential over the human 
spirit. Does not the following sentence imply this ? ' ' The 
inward property or disposition of the soul lies now in the 
first created configuration of the stars or constellations, in 
the Eternal commencing ground, that is not co-imagined or 



122 Jacob Boehtne 

framed together in the bestial configuration of the stars." — 
[Election, chap. 8, par. 121.] 

And here again: " For as man has the outward constella- 
tion or astrum in him, which is his wheel of the outward 
world's essences and cause of the mind ; so also he hath the 
inward constellation of the fire-essences, as also in the 
second principle he hath the light-flaming Divine essences." 
— [Incarnation, part 1, chap. 5, par. 11.] 

I must refer the reader to chap. 9, of Threefold Life, pars. 
71 to 77, for a passage so imperfectly understood by me 
that I cannot feel at all sure whether its true sense would 
confirm my theory; these words seem, however, to look 
that way. "The image in the Revelation hath twelve stars 
upon the crown ; for the image representeth God, it is the 
similitude of God in which He revealeth Himself, and where- 
in He dwelleth. . . . The number twelve containeth 
two kingdoms in the doubled number of six, viz., an an- 
gelic and a human, which together make twelve." (pars. 
75 and 76.) But surely it is very probable that the stars to 
which Boehme referred so mysteriously in pars. 17 and 22 
of the next chapter as beyond ken, because of prevailing 
evil, are those which produce spiritual substance ( or form ) 
in the already evolved human soul. Jane Lead, who 
learned much from him, is very clear upon this point, say- 
ing in her Revelation of Revelations, par. 33: "The out- 
going power of the Holy Ghost sets the soul free in the 
Eternal liberty, from all conflicts which the dragon, or the 
starry region, hath introduced; for the soul is now influenced 
by those superior planets, to which these outward planets 
are subject"; and again at p. 42, "The suns and stars 
which were seen about the head of the woman in the 
Revelation signify those superior planets, which cannot be 
adulterated with the defilements of this inferior orb, as 
possessing far higher and more exalted powers, carrying 
dominion over all that is beneath them. For as the lower 
planets hold down in subjection to the curse, so these de- 



Jacob Boehme 123 

liver and set free from it." Boehme appears to justify her 
assertion, and my inference, in the following passage: 
" The whole outward visible world, with all its being, is a 
figure of the inward spiritual world; whatsoever is inter- 
nally, and howsoever its operation is, so likewise it hath its 
character externally." — [Signatura Rerum, chap. 9, par. 1.] 

Now he abundantly shows that the operation of life- 
giving in all three principles has been by breathing in of 
life; as here: " All whatsoever hath life liveth in the speak- 
ing Word, the angels in the eternal speaking and the tem- 
poral spirits in the re-expression or the echoing forth of the 
formings of Time, out of the sound or breath of Time; and 
the angels out of the sound of Eternity, viz., out of the 
voice of the manifest of God." — [Mysterium Magnum, 
chap. 8, par. 32.] 

The formings of Time I take to be the substance produced 
by the ethereal vibrations of our sun and planet; for he says: 
" By this partition, comprehension, and framing of the 
power of the stars, and of the four elements, we under- 
stand Time and the creaturely beginning of this world." — 
[Election, chap. 5, par. 43.] 

By the manifested word of God, I understand "the angels 
which are mere imaged powers of the word of God," of 
whom he says: "Now as man with his senses and thoughts 
governeth the world and all things and substances, so God, 
the Eternal Unity, ruleth all things through the manage- 
ment and doings of angels, only the power and work is 
God's." — [ Sixth, Theosophic Qiiestion, pars. 2 and 7.] 

Speaking of "their princely dominion" in another of his 
books, he says " that they rule in the properties of nature 
above the four elements, yea, also above the operation of 
the stars in the soul of the Great World; which also bear 
the Names of God." — [Mysterium Magnum, chap. 35, par. 

10.] 

And again: "Each angelical prince is a property out of 
the voice of God and beareth the great name of God; as we 



124 Jacob Boehme 

have a type and figure of it in the stars of the firmament 
which are altogether one only dominion, and have their 
princely dominion in power under them." — [Signatura 
Rentm, chap. 16, par. 5.] 

These are the mighty beings who seem to answer to 
jane Lead's "superior planets," and if Boehme's dictum 
holds good, "This is the right or law of Deity that every 
life in the body of God should generate itself in one uniform 
way; l though it be done through many various imaginings, 
yet the life hath one uniform way and original in all," — 
[Aurora, chap. 25, par. 5] — must we not consequently in- 
fer that from "the imaged powers of the word of God" 
creative breath has proceeded ? given forth, as Boehme anx- 
iously insists, not out of, but in the voice of God; from 
mighty beings, in the highest regions to their subordinate 
officers in our visible solar system, who in their turn out- 
breathe those slower vibrations which form soul-life on a 
lower plane, and continue to elaborate its substance till it is 
able to receive and retain the finer and swifter action of 
super-solar breath ? a How consonant is such an hypothesis 
with Swedenborg's report ( he who assures us that our sun 
is but a small representative of the great spiritual sun from 
which all life derives.) 

-* The quality of intelligence from the Divine," he wrote, 
" was shown, and this also by a light which was brighter 
and more luminous than the noonday light of the sun, ex- 
tending to all distance and terminating like the light of the 
sun in the universe " . . . "for intelligence is nothing 
else than an eminent modification of the heavenly light 
which is from the Lord." — [Arcana Ccelestia, 4,419, 
4.4*4-] 

1 The Sidereal Spirit is the soul of the Great world which depends on the 
Punctum Solis, and receiveth its life and light from it. — \Mysterium Magnum, 
1 1-20.] 

2 Heaven and earth and all whatsoever there is therein, and all that is above 
the Heavens, is together the body or corporeity of God. — [ Aurora, chap. 2, 
par. 28.] 



Jacob Boehme 125 

Does he not also help us to understand why the slower 
vibrations of ether have to evolve the grosser forms of soul- 
life before other finer and swifter begin to be perceptible ? 
"That forms or substances are arranged in a manner most 
suitable for the influx of life, may be manifest from every 
single thing that appears in our living bodies. Unless life 
were received in substances which are forms, there would 
be no living thing in the natural or spiritual world " . . 

" for substances or forms are the determining subjects." 
— [ Animal Kingdom.'] x 

If the bearings of this truth on spiritual life were per- 
ceived, these essays on form would not seem, as I fear they 
must, a fruitless waste of time as well as a too ambitious 
direction of thought. If in another attempt I can make 
good my purpose, neither the reader's nor the writer's 
patience will be thrown away. 

1 The outward flesh received the outward air, and its constellation for a 
rational and vegetative life, to the manifestation of the wonders of God; and 
the light body, or heavenly substance, received the breath of the great Divine 
powers and virtues, which breath is called the Holy Ghost. — [Regeneration, 
chap. 2, par. 39.] — " First the natural body and after that the spiritual," St. 
Paul had said long ago. We are enabled now to understand a little how 
such bodies are formed. 



SPIRITUAL ENEMIES 

" We are to consider how, out of the eternal good, an evil is come to be? " 
— [J. B.'s Mysterium Magnum, chap. 3, p. 2.] 

If indeed mystical research is one of the objects which 
Light was intended to promote, ideas drawn from Jacob 
Boehme, the greatest of European mystics, cannot be out 
of place in its pages; very much out of favour no doubt 
they are. The majority of readers cannot care for them; 
but it is in the minority that pioneers of spiritual progress 
are generally found, and believing that to such Boehme's 
teaching is welcome, and that by such some adequate no- 
tion of its value will gain larger currency, I venture to plunge 
once more into a subject that must necessarily be abstruse 
— the nature of those enemies from whom human souls 
have to be saved- I was going to say desire to be saved ; 
but the characteristic of our time is that that desire is so 
faint in the majority as to be hardly perceptible. There 
must be some reason for this which the pulpit phrase, "a 
growing want of faith," hardly suffices to explain. The 
want is evident enough— its cause in contemporary intel- 
lectual life not so easily detected. Torpor of the will, stim- 
ulated externally by ever new varieties of allurement, and 
dulled, as to internal consciousness, by consequent pre- 
occupation, is of course the main factor of coldness to 
spiritual interests; but the peculiar anomaly of our day is 
that often, with a very serious attention to these, there is 
entire contempt for all that used to act on our ancestors, 
either as a religious check or incentive — the common atti- 
tude of many a highly cultivated mind as to this, being such 
as we take with regard to machinery that did its work well 
in the past, but has since been superseded by better in- 
ventions. 



Jacob Boehme 127 

For example, when it is a question of belief in the Incar- 
nation of the Son of God for the redemption of man, it is 
not vigorous disbelief that one generally discovers in unbe- 
lievers, so much as total indifference. Arguments and evi- 
dence miss their aim on minds quite incurious as to proof or 
disproof. When no need of salvation has been felt or per- 
ceived, the fact of a Saviour having come must be wholly 
unconcerning; and if, setting aside all apprehension as to a 
future life, it is urged that one came on earth "to save His 
people from their sins," the proffer is unheeded, not from 
ignorance of sin, or always from any lack of sincerest long- 
ing to be rid of its yoke, but from the conviction of power- 
ful minds that human beings are able to be their own sav- 
iours; or in natures of an opposite mould, that sin is a fa- 
tality and not evitable. 

This, so far as I can understand, is the fashion of modern 
philosophy, and it holds its ground by virtue of partial 
truth, famous as an amalgam for the rapid extension of 
error. Accepting such truth so far as it goes, — that by our 
own force if we will we can often resist temptation, and that 
organisations are frequently met with whose escape from 
sin would be little short of miraculous, — I appeal both to 
history and to present living consciousness when asking, 
has sin no greater force than what self-command and self- 
culture can over-power? Have we verily no enemies 
worse than ourselves, promoting vice, urging us to evil ? 

It is very old-fashioned to admit any belief in the Satan 
of Holy Writ and the powers of darkness, against which it 
warns; by many people they have been consigned with 
Luther's devil to the lumber room of history, as obsolete 
superstitions; and so ignorant are we, for the most part, of 
the weakness of human nature, that in saying as some do, 
that they are not afraid of finding any worse enemy than 
self, they think it an assurance of comparative safety. But 
if in man's radical being there are realms of potential anguish 
and unguessed springs of torment, if, indeed, there is noth- 



128 Jacob Boehme 

ing in the universe which the soul of man does not com- 
prise and share, what an idle boast it is! And if there are 
no evil beings alike the accomplices and the avengers of sin, 
why such terror in evil doers when death comes to shut 
them out in the unseen world ? What do they fear if there 
are no powers of darkness ? The wrath of God ? Alas! it 
is not only belief in a devil, that has been dissipated in the 
crucible of modern thought! 

Carlyle said truly, "The effects of optics in this strange 
camera obscura of existence are most of all singular. The 
grand centre of the modern revolution of ideas is ever this 
— we begin to have a notion that all this is the effect of op- 
tics, and that the intrinsic fact is very different from our 
old conception of it." From Boehme I learned what is the 
difference of the intrinsic fact and our conception of spirit- 
ual dangers; and I can see how extremely difficult it would 
be to rectify mistakes which run on a smooth, well-worn 
groove of habit, by recondite truths for which a road must 
be cut out through all oppositions of prejudice and sloth. 
Still this much must be granted, that hitherto no school of 
religionists has pretended to meet the root obstacle to re- 
ligious faith, — the power of evil in a world created by Om- 
nipotent God. It is invariably invaded: reason and philos- 
ophy are warned off that ground, and piety tries to fence 
off any approach to it, as the brink of a tremendous abyss 
of perplexity, lest there it should be maddened into Atheism. 

Boehme challenged his contemporaries on just this point, 
asking after many other questions, " What do you suppose 
God's wrath to be? or what is that in man which dis- 
pleaseth God so much that he tormenteth and afflicteth 
man so, seeing he hath created him ? And that he imput- 
eth sin unto man and condemneth him to eternal punish- 
ment? Why hath he created that wherein or wherewith 
man committeth sin ? Surely that thing must be far worse ? 
Wherefore and out of what is that come to be ? or what is 
the cause, or the beginning, or the birth and geniture of 



Jacob Boehme 129 

God's fierce wrath out of or from which hell and the devil 
are come to be ? Or how comes it that all the creatures in 
this world do bite, scratch, strike, beat and worry one an- 
other, and yet sin is imputeth only to man ? Out of what 
are poisonous and venomous beasts and worms, and all 
manner of vermin come to be?" . . . "Give your di- 
rect and fundamental answer to this, and demonstrate what 
you say." — [Aurora, chap. 22, par. }6.~\ 

No answer has ever been attempted — to the best of my 
belief — from his time to ours. It has been easier, and it 
was judged to be safer, to leave such mysteries alone ; and 
as to attending to the one who did give answer to these 
questions, it was much easier to call him either a dangerous 
fanatic, or a wild dreamer, than to master one of his books. 
Only a few, and those of robust intellect, have accepted his 
teachings, at first as but a theoretic scheme; and at last as 
revelation that appeased all doubts. 

But was it safe to leave these awful mysteries untouched ? 
Did not such careful ignoring of their pressure on the mind 
cause suspicion that danger to faith lay there ? When so 
many spiritual delusions have been ended by critical analysts 
of the past, it cannot surprise us that with this terrible ex- 
cuse for doubt in the unexplained rule of evil ( not to speak 
of any other excuse drawn from the lives of average Chris- 
tians), reflective people begin to suspect all previous arti- 
cles of faith of being accommodations to human ignorance. 
It is thus that every transitional epoch endangers the kernel 
with the husk. 

Now, one often hears it said that all religions must un- 
dergo change and modification, as if that truth justified dis- 
belief in the essentials of Christianity; a child when first 
conscious of the laws of perspective might as wisely say 
that these prevented his seeing some lofty hill conspicuous 
from all sides. Human ideas of Deity must expand, and 
so far alter with growth, but to try and efface the centre of 
structural life would be the very reverse of evolution ; and 
9 



1 30 Jacob Boehme 

to ignore a God is quite as much a retrograde movement. 

Let me, as well as I can, sum up a few positions in which, 
apart from Boehme's solution, we must find ourselves when 
confronting the power of evil in this world. Either we 
must suppose evil and good to be alike the fortuitous out- 
come of impersonal will-less forces; or that evil originates 
in the will of some mighty Being not God, with whom God 
is in conflict, and so far as we can see in all our past and 
present here, not victorious; or to use the words of Mr. St. 
George Stock, "That evil is appointed in the good provi- 
dence of God for some wise end." Had he said permitted, 
that statement might be allowed by the mystic, "but," he 
adds, "if all is to come right to the end, one hardly sees 
why it should have come wrong in the beginning." Now, 
it is precisely that which Boehme helps us to see. 

I shall have to draw so much from Boehme in order to 
give his solution of the mystery of evil that my own words 
will be little more than connecting links for his. Earth- 
worms quote very largely from depths of earth which few 
eyes care to examine, and the little heaps of sifted mould 
which they bring up from the rough confusion of a lower 
soil, serve to fertilise its more superficial plane. My am- 
bition is to perform the office of an earthworm in another 
sort of ground. 

When the creation of human beings is spoken of, it is as 
if a creature such as man could be willed into existence by 
Divine "fiat" without any possibility of defect (though 
that would make the derived being equal to its Creator), 
and without any formative constituents of nature. Any 
idea of means to this end is usually deemed unworthy of 
being connected with the work of Omnipotence; and this 
in a universe where, so far as we can judge, no end is at- 
tained without an enchainment of means that astonishes by 
its subtle niceties of adaptation, whenever it can be traced 
out. 

"Many authors," says Boehme — [Aurora, chap. 19, 



Jacob Boebme 131 

v. 67 ] — ''have written that Heaven and earth are framed out 
of nothing, but I do wonder that among so many excellent 
men there hath not one been found that would yet describe 
the true ground, seeing the same God which now is hath 
been from eternity. Now, where nothing is, there nothing 
can come to be; all things must have a root, else nothing 
can grow. If the seven spirits of nature had not been from 
eternity then there would be no angel, no Heaven, also no 
earth have come to be." ( N. B. — He means eternal nature, 
as all the rest of his teaching proves.) Further on he refers 
to these seven spirits again thus: " Thou must know that 
all the seven spirits of God are in the earth, and generate as 
they do in Heaven. For the earth is in God, and God never 
died." — [Aurora, chap. 21, par. 78.] And in man, "for 
man's house of flesh is also such a house as the dark deep 
of this world's, in which the seven spirits of God generate 
themselves." — [Ibid, chap. 26, par. 81.] 

To explain by Boehme's own words what he means by 
these seven spirits of Eternal Nature, and the seven " forms " 
in the nature of our universe derived from that, would be 
to write a small volume, not very intelligible either. I must 
therefore hazard an attempt, roughly and briefly, to indicate 
what he tells about them, viz., that the Infinite Source of 
all being willed to manifest the infinite wonders of the Abys- 
sal only God; that this will caused the magnetic (attractive) 
compression of desire, the darkness of an enclosure of a 
previously unseeking infinitude of powers and ideas which a 
he calls "the nothing" — in contradiction to any conceivable 
somewhat, and sometimes the " liberty." " The Lubet of 
the liberty doth introduce itself into Nature and essence, 
that it might be manifest in power, wonder, and being." — 
[Signatura Rerum, chap. 14, par. 26.] This enclosure of 

1 " For the vast infinite space desireth enclosure and narrowness, wherein 
it may manifest itself, for else in the wide stillness there would be no mani- 
festation. Therefore there must be an attraction and inclosing out of which 
the manifestation appeareth." — [ Threefold Life, chap. 1, par. 3}.~] 



H2 Jacob Boehme 

the desire, condensing power, so to speak, for concentrated 
purpose, is the cause of the second form of nature (itself 
the first) — the mobility, with its ceaseless wrestling to es- 
cape from that strong astringent force, and both together 
are the cause of the third — the anguish generated by such 
contrary action, and the divided sensibility it necessitates; 
this again drives on to such intensity of whirling motion as 
to enkindle fire, the fourth form ; this again, by the secret 
influence of the Lubet, producing light and love, the fifth; 
sound and resulting intelligence the sixth; and all these 
finding in the seventh substantiality , their completion and 
full appeasement. ( This is, I am well aware, a very lame 
and crude representation of Boehme's revelation as to the 
origin of Nature; but this consoles me for my total inability 
to do justice to my theme; competent writers have admi- 
rably written about it — Dionysius Freher and William Law, 
for instance, and what they wrote is unread. Inferior arti- 
cles have in the present day a better chance of attention.) 

It may be well to quote (abbreviated) one of Boehme's 
shortest summaries to justify my paraphrase; it can hardly 
be said to explain. 

" We find seven especial properties in Nature, whereby 
this only mother worketh all things, which are these; viz., 
first, Desire, which is astringent, cold and hard and dark; 
secondly, bitterness, which is the sting of the astringent 
hard enclosure; this is the cause of all motion and life; 
thirdly, the anguish by reason of the raging of the impres- 
sion where the impressed darkness falleth into a tearing an- 
guish and pain by reason of the sting. Fourthly, the fire, 
where the eternal will (the Lubet) doth introduce itself in- 
to a darting flash " . . . "with which the hardness is 
again consumed and introduced into a corporeal moving 
spirit. Fifthly, the egress of the free will out of the dark- 
ness and out of the fire, and the potent desire which it hath 
sharpened in the fire, doth now in the light's desire draw 
into itself the essence from the fire, dying according to its 



Jacob Boehme 133 

hunger, the which is now water, and in the lustre it is a 
tincture from the fire and light, viz., a love desire. Sixth- 
ly, the voice or sound. Seventhly, whatsoever the six forms 
are spiritually that the seventh is essentially, or in real sub- 
stance. 

" Thus these are the seven forms of the Mother of all Be- 
ings, whence all whatsoever is, is in this generated." — [Sig- 
natura Rerum, chap. 14, pars. 10 to 15.] 

1 am painfully conscious of the obscurity of this passage; 
on first reading it will affect the mind as wonderful non- 
sense; but could any true explanation of creating life be 
sensed by the intelligence of man in his present state ? I am 
sure it could not. The entirely ignorant must take some- 
thing on trust, before any foundation of knowledge can be 
laid. 

Readers who are fortunate enough to possess any of 
Boehme's writings will find in each of them abundant men- 
tion of these seven forces or forms of Eternal Nature. 
What I fail to make as intelligible as the subject admits, 
reference to his full accounts may make clearer. For in- 
stance, Aurora, chap. 18, par. 28. But I must observe 
that had it not been for Freher's more lucid, though very 
profound treatise on Deity as manifested through Nature, 
1 should never, from Boehme alone, have been able to un- 
derstand what he meant by the Lubet, or how the good 
pleasure of Divine love acted through the wrestling wheel 
of the seven Spirits of God. Those who have access to 
this very rare work or to C. Walton's Memorial of Law 
( unpublished, but to be found in most of our largest li- 
braries ), which contains large extracts from other writings 
of Freher will find the trouble of following his close line of 
argument richly repaid. 

Now, it is in the arrest of the right evolution of these 
seven forms of Eternal Nature that all evil begins, and be- 
fore we deal with the question, "Who are our spiritual en- 
emies ? " we ought to learn how it is that in a world crea- 



134 Jacob Boebme 

ted by a holy God, anything can be antagonistic; and, as 
these "forms" are the seven Spirits of God, "generating 
God," as Boehme has it, the Scriptural saying, "I create 
evil" (Isaiah xiv, 7) is strictly true; though it is none the 
less true that God is love and did not will evil. 

Let us try if by any possible analogy we can help our- 
selves to understand this passage ever so little. Suppose 
that an embryonic form of human origin was shewn to us, 
we should regard it with horror; it is an abortion, a com- 
paratively formless and revolting approach to what, in its 
full growth, is a beautiful human shape, and yet it is a 
requisite preparation for that matured excellence. All sin- 
ful beings, in our kind of bodies or out of them, are in this 
sense embryonic monsters; they have fallen short of right 
evolution; they act and feel in God and by the powers of 
God, and yet are contrary to God and remain in the wrath 
of God because good in them has not been wrought out to 
true being. And what is the cause cf this evil is equally 
the cause of the ceaseless unrest of human life. " Rest," 
F. Baader tells us, "is unimpeded total activity. Every be- 
ing acts restlessly so long as it has not attained the totality 
of its energies. The striving forces of Time seek rest, not 
to die but to be active without hindrance." 

Perhaps Freher's image of the broken ring gives as good 
an idea of the cause of antagonism from breach of original 
sequence as any form of words could. After a long and 
careful exposition of the original good of the darkness which 
must underlie the production of fire before light itself can be 
manifested, he continues: " It belonged therefore essentially 
to God's eternal manifestation, of which it was — as to our 
weak apprehension — the first beginning that could have 
been made, if its end was to be attained; and which be- 
ginning having never been separated from its end, could 
not have been evil and stand in opposition to its end, 
which was good, and both together were but one thing. 
For this end found and took hold of its beginning and swal- 



Jacob Boehme 135 

lowed it up, so that they made together but one globe 
wherein they were inseparably within each other, the light 
manifested in the darkness and shining in it, and the dark- 
ness hid in the light, and not comprehending it; as we see 
in a simile, in every ring or circle in which the beginning 
and the end are united and combined, and which would 
never be called a circle or a ring if it had no beginning and 
end, yet so that the end always lays hold of the beginning 
and swallows it up into itself, and the beginning be lost 
and disappear in the end. Now, Lucifer, who, it is grant- 
ed, is not a maker, still less a creator, but a destroyer, first 
broke the harmonious ring in himself — for inasmuch as he 
was a creature, inferior and posterior to Eternal Nature, he 
must necessarily have had it within himself— and thereby 
the beginning of it appeared by itself divided from its end, 
and was placed in strong opposition against it ; just as when 
a ring is broken a beginning and end appear opposite to 
each other, whereas it was before but one entire thing." 1 

Lucifer, according to Boehme, first looked back into the 
strong first forms of Eternal Nature, in which he thought 
with his Jire to prove superiority over the meekness of light ; 
and in this process of imagining for himself self-chosen 
elevations, his light extinguished and his fire remained in 
the dark world. 

To enlarge upon this portion of the subject would carry 
this paper beyond bounds, and is not necessary for its aim ; 
only it should not be forgotten that any attempt to popu- 
larise doctrines of this vast scope must be at the sacrifice of 
all due proportion ; many an adjacent branch of the subject 
must be ignored if minds unused to such themes are to be 
won to attend to them at all. The point I wish to make 
good without fatiguing by too copious extracts from my 
teacher, is that what we call evil took its rise when first 
Spirits of exceeding power, acting in God with all the Di- 
vine forces of the first four Spirits of Eternal Nature, "fell 

1 From D. A. Archer's Third Section of Treatise on Deity. 



136 Jacob Boehme 

short of the glory of God," and broke the perfect sequence 
of right evolution. And that these mighty angels, with all 
their constituent Spirits, have for millions of ages remained 
in this state of tremendous opposition to light, to love, to 
all that is called in a special sense God — though nothing can 
have being out of, or apart from, the first Creator — God, the 
Father of Spirits. 

If I am told that all this belief in Lucifer and the fallen 
angels is the remains of superstition, an absolete engine of 
priestcraft, I would request answer to this one question — 
since no philosopher will, I suppose, deny the truth of this 
dictum of St. Martin's: "La mesure d'une erreur est en 
meme temps la mesure de la verite correspondante, " — [ L' Es- 
prit des Choses, vol. 1, p. 88] — what can the tiuth be 
which corresponds to these old world beliefs in a mighty 
tempter, a cruel adversary, a tormentor of evil men ? 

If both philosophy and theology are silent, surely the 
answer which during two centuries has satisfied some of 
the strongest intellects, might be accepted now for at least 
a working hypothesis. 

"We have shown you already concerning the seven 
forms of the Centre of the Eternal nature, where every form 
is a several well-spring of nature; in like manner out of 
every form, out of every well-spring, go forth spirits, ac- 
cording to the multiplicity of essences and properties, every 
one according to its kind." — [ Threefold Life, chap. 4, par. 

37-1 

It is curious how absolutely blind we may be to the 
freight of a sentence for which we have no prepared 
ground: it may be read repeatedly and yet lodge no idea in 
the mind. This is particularly the case when we read 
writings so loaded with obscurities as Boehme's necessarily 
are. ( Could the riddle of the universe, if it were explained 
to us, be solved in simple language?) I suppose I must 
have passed over these words, " Out of every form go forth 
spirits/' at least a dozen times before — only a year ago 



Jacob Boehme 137 

they suddenly lit up a labyrinth of puzzles for which I had 
never found a clue. But I had found and held fast the 
Scriptural sayings that caused these puzzles, and so when 
the light flashed in, there was proof of its being true light, 
ready at every point at which it fell. And just this is the 
advantage of the blind faith so often scornfully spoken of; 
it fixes words of revealed truth in the mind, and holds 
them there until intelligence can overtake belief: whereas if 
only what can be understood is retained, the measure of 
understanding is too likely to become the test of what we 
can believe to be true, and then the superstitions of ignor- 
ance stultify us more and more. 

I read in the Bible of the enemies of the soul, of the 
powers of darkness, of spiritual wickedness in high places, 
and without any cavil, asked myself, How can God allow 
them to be powers ? Why are they enemies ? How did 
spiritual wickedness get into high places ? and this tempt- 
ing of the devil, even supposing that myriads of evil spirits 
form the enemy of mankind, how is it affected when, so 
far as self-consciousness goes, we are, for the most part, 
our own tempters ? But having fully grasped Boehme's 
doctrine as to the soul of man being existent in the mutual 
interaction of the seven Spirits of Eternal Nature, having for 
the root of its manifested life the three first "tormentive 
forms " of that nature, — the fourth fire for its first essential 
life in nature; and the three last forms for the blissful evo- 
lution of that life, with a will acting in its fiery life free to 
allow either form or property of nature to elevate itself above 
the rest in its own abyss; free to "imagine into" either, to 
draw with all the magic magnetic strength of the will to- 
wards either, — then these few words, " Out of every form 
go forth spirits," explained to me more than I had ever 
hoped in this life to understand. 

To say that a man has no worse enemy than himself, 
meaning by such words that he permits and indulges what 
is evil in himself, is therefore to utter a very foolish, igno- 



138 Jacob Boehme 

rant, and cruelly misleading notion. For what is man ? A 
being who consists as to nature (of his anti-naturing origi- 
nal I do not speak) of these seven forms of Eternal Nature, 
which extend through all created worlds and cause all 
manifestation of spiritual life : hence his own abyss of be- 
ing is in a very mysterious but terrible sense contiguous to 
that of all others, and limitless in potentiality. What is 
more awful still, man made in the likeness of God has no 
equal in the spiritual world in this prerogative — he alone 
among all creatures is a denizen of what Boehme calls the 
three principles, i.e., the dark world, the world of light, 
and the world of ultimated essences; (corrupt and mixed 
in the nature of our earth, but pure and glorious and truly 
substantial in the region from which our world of nature 
derives;) so that spirits native to those three principles all 
desire the agency of man, for "all would be creaturely" ; 
even, so Boehme tells, "the Deity hath had a longing to see 
the wonders of the Eternal Nature and of the innumerable 
essences in substance and in corporeal things. — [ Threefold 
Life, chap. 4, par. 26.] All seek the agency of a being who 
can represent their dominant desire in ultimates. 

In the commonest instincts of human nature this longing 
to realise internal life by external shows itself ; witness the 
efforts of an angry person to get some one else into a rage ; 
of rough strong men to promote a fight ; of greedy or friv- 
olous characters to further the gluttony and vanity which 
they cannot themselves indulge. Now in the dark world 
where true substance is impossible to attain, this eagerness 
for embodied representatives is presumably very strong. 

In the seventh form of Eternal Nature, the substantiality, 
all the other forms find their completion and rest, and this, 
one may suppose, is one reason for the effort of the spirits 
in each principle or property to find ultimation, i.e., em- 
bodiment in man. 

"The desire of the dark world is after the manifestation, 
viz., after the outward world, to attract and draw the same 



Jacob Boebme 139 

essentiality into it, and thereby to satisfy its wrathful hun- 
ger." — [Signatura Return, chap. 2, par. 35.] 

For every fire in the spiritual as well as in the material 
world needs substance to maintain its strength. Let us 
pause a moment to think what the will of an angry person 
is; — anger, that so common ripple on the surface of life's 
tremendous depths! — in connection with the following pas- 
sage: " The Spirit of God worketh in love and anger. For 
it is the spirit of every life; it is in everything, like as the 
things will and property is; for one property receiveth an- 
other; what the soul willeth, that willeth also the same into 
which the soul turneth itself: it is all magical: whatsoever 
the will of a thing willeth, that it receiveth." — [ Fifth of 
Six Great Points, chap. 8, pars. 48 and 49.] Remembering 
also that "the original nature, first, and radical principle or 
constituent essence of the soul without the light of God is 
as mere a devil or infernal dragon as Lucifer himself is." — 
[An Epistle of J. Boehme's, par. 11.] 

Any one meeting the eye of man or woman when wrath 
bursts into utterance, must have instinctive consciousness 
of this, little as the oppressive or agitating influences of rage 
are understood. And not only one dragon in human guise 
confronts us then, — not one bosom devil animates us when 
our wrath blazes out: in either case, a multitude of spirits 
who go forth from the well-spring of nature in the prop- 
erty of wrath, combine to emphasize the provocation and 
keep up the fire. This is quite as certain as that the least 
brawl in the street quickly attracts a circle of eagerly sym- 
pathising spectators; and, if we but knew what we were 
about when we allow an angry look or word or gesture to 
escape us, we should suppress the first movement of indig- 
nation as anxiously as we remove gunpowder from risks of 
accidental ignition. 

We have good and evil in us, into which we frame our 
willing, the essence thereof become stirring in us, and such 
a property we draw also from without into us." . . . 



140 Jacob Boehme 

"If we lead ourselves to the good, then God's Spirit help- 
eth us, but if we lead ourselves to evil, then God's fierce 
wrath and anger helpeth us ; what we will, of that prop- 
erty we get a leader, and thereunto we lead ourselves. And 
yet it is not the Deity's will that we perish, but His anger's 
and our will." — [Fifth of Six Great Points, chap. 8, pars. 
S2-54.] 

The fall of Lucifer is described by Boehme as having been 
caused by his sense of power leading him to despise "the 
meekness and lowliness in which consisteth the Kingdom 
of Heaven, and the virtue of the heart of God." "He saw 
( he tells us ) the greatest hidden mysteries of the Deity 
stand in such humility, he took offence at it, and entered 
into the fierce might of the fire, and would domineer with 
his own self-wit and reason over the heart of God: he 
would that God should be in subjection under him, he 
would be a framer and creator in nature, and therefore he 
became a devil." — [ Threefold Life, chap. 4, par. 61.] 

I am, of course, very far from thinking that by this crude 
statement, I convey any adequate notion of what these 
words were meant to indicate, — as far as I am from think- 
ing that I fully understand them; but I understand enough 
for my immediate purpose, which is to show how evil and 
enmity began among the "throne angels," and let us hear 
Boehme's account of these before we go further. " Behold, 
when God set the Fiat in the will and would create angels, 
then the Spirit first separated all qualities after that manner 
as you now see there are many kinds of stars, and so the 
Fiat created them. Then there were created the princely 
angels and the throne angels, according to every quality 
out of the source of the Fire, a similitude whereof you have 
in the stars, how different they are." (Note that the three 
first forms of Eternal Nature and the darkness they move in 
are necessarily prior in action to the opening of the " source 
of fire." ) " Now the throne and princely angels are every 
one of them a great fountain." . . . "Out of each fount- 



Jacob Boehme 141 

ain came forth again a centre in many thousand thousands." 
. . . " Every host which proceeded out of one and 
the same fountain got a will in the same fountain which 
was their prince." — [Three Principles, chap. 11, par. 2.] 

Now, "when the moving to the creating of the angels 
was effected, then," . . . "the properties stood in 
great working and did will to be creatural. In these prop- 
erties did the creaturely will of Lucifer create; when he did 
apprehend the omnipotence therein, and found the wonder 
doing power himelf." — [Seventh Theosophic Qiiestion, pars. 
4 and 5.] "And instantly the properties in him became 
revealed or manifested, viz., the cold fire," — (query, what 
we mean by negative electricity ?) — " also the sharp, hard, 
bitter, stinging painfulness or torment of the fire: thus be- 
came he an enemy of all love, humility, and meek gentle- 
ness." — [Ibid, par. 7.] 

Why thus ? " Because every property keepeth its own 
desire, for a property is nothing but a hunger, and the hun- 
ger doth form itself into such an essence as itself is." . . 
. "The dark hunger desireth essence according to its 
property, viz., earthly things; and the bitter hunger de- 
sireth bitter raging, stinging pain; and the hunger of an- 
guish desireth anxious hunger; also the melancholy taketh 
the desire to die, and continual sadness." — [Signatur a Re- 
runt, chap. 14, pars. 52-56.] (Alas! we have not far to 
seek for proof of this; we find it in ourselves; we bewail it 
in other people! ) 

And, further, Lucifer "desired to be an artist He saw 
the Creation, and understood the ground, wherein he would 
be an own self-God, and rule with the central fire's might 
in all things, and image himself with all things, in all forms, 
that he might be what he would, and not what the Creator 
would; as. indeed, this is still to this day their greatest joy " 
(the host of Lucifer ) "that they can transmute themselves 
into many images, and thus achieve or make fancy." — 
[ Tenth Theosophic Question, par. 1.] 



142 Jacob Boebme 

It was just this self-chosen application of power — this 
willing in opposition to the holy will of the whole of God's 
eternal nature, that brought the mighty rebel and all his 
hosts, in Boehme's language, "out of the temperature." 
"This is the very abomination before God that the life's 
forms are gone out from the equal agreement," — [Fourth 
Text of Apology 3, point 2, par. 66] — for "nothing is evil 
which remaineth in the equal accord, for that which the 
worst doth cause and make with its coming forth out of the 
accord, that likewise maketh the best in the equal accord." 
. . . "All was very exceeding good, but with its own 
elevation and departure out of the equality it becomes evil, 
and brings itself out of the form or property of the love and 
joy into a painful tormenting form and property." . . . 
"King Lucifer stood in the beginning of his creation in 
highest joyfulness, but he departed from the likeness. He 
forsook his order, and went out of the harmony wherein 
God created him; he would be lord of all, and so he entered 
into the austere fire's domination, and is now an instrument 
in the austere fire's might, upon which also the all-essential 
spirit striketh and soundeth upon his instrument; but it 
soundeth only according to the wrathful fire's property." — 
[Stgnatura Return, chap. 16, pars. 6 and 7.] I think we 
have now sufficient data to understand why, if "out of 
every form as a well-spring go forth spirits " with the same 
will as that of their awakening Prince, the soul of man, 
which subsists in the perpetual interaction of the seven 
forms of Eternal Nature, must live among enemies to peace, 
externally as well as internally, constitutionally opposed to 
its welfare, until all are atoned, made one in equal action 
by perfected evolution. Now, by such unsuitable terms as 
outer and inner, which in a deeper sense no one could use 
regarding spirits, I only mean to indicate that enemies arise 
from the discords of other souls as well as from those be- 
ginning in our own. 

Very significantly does Boehme say in his Aurora, to 



Jacob Boehme 143 

which I must refer the student for copious ( and to a patient 
mind fairly intelligible) teaching about Lucifer, "In his 
pride he smote himself with darkness and blindness, and 
made himself a devil. He knew in God only the majesty 
and not the Word in the centre. He would needs inflame 
himself and rule in the fire pver the meekness." — [Aurora, 
chap. 15, par. 12.] To the present hour how incessantly 
we make the same mistake! The dignity of pride, the su- 
perb stateliness of indignation, the forceful bluster of wrath, 
how much stronger and more availing they feel to every 
angry human heart ! It knows the majesty, i.e., the might 
of the kindled aching forms of nature, but not "the Word 
in the centre," the meek light of love escaping from the 
fire, and shining far beyond the lurid prison where only 
wrath and pain can be generated, and never the waters of 
eternal life and the imperishable substance which it forms. 
The forces of Eternal Nature are mighty, but to the 
Word in the centre alone was all power given in Heaven 
and in earth. 

In. the first book of Kings, chap. 19, the agency of the 
powers of Divine Nature, as contrasted with that of the 
Word of God, is marked emphatically. We read there 
that "The Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind 
rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before 
the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind, and after the 
the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earth- 
quake, and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not 
in the fire, and after the fire a still small voice." To this 
the negative is not added, and we are led to suppose that 
the God of Israel was in that voice made known. Again, 
when the disciples of Jesus proposed to bring fire from 
Heaven to punish the Samaritans, His gentle monition, " Ye 
know not what manner of spirit ye are of," suggests Divine 
knowledge of the evil source of a wish for exercising re- 
sistant power even with good intentions. ' ' The devil sought 
great strength and power, as also the present world doth 



144 Jacob Boebme 

great might and honour and despiseth the light of love." — 
[ Third Great Point, chap. 4, par. 31.] And until Jesus 
Christ came to this earth and shewed the majesty of humble 
self-sacrifice, the power of meekness was unknown, and to 
this day so contrary is it to our natural ideas of greatness 
that very generally it is mistaken for defect of force. 

" Learn of Me for I am meek and lowly of heart," was 
the new and wonderful teaching of Him Who gave for His 
last and all-embracing commandment, "Love one another." 
And now we know that "in love and meekness we become 
new-born out of the anger of God; in love and meekness 
we must strive and fight," . . . "for love is the devil's 
poison, it is a fire of terror to him wherein he cannot stay." 
— [ Second part of Treatise on Incarnation, chap. 7, pars. 
44, 45.] " Therefore it is that Christ so earnestly teacheth 
us love, humility, and mercifulness; and the cause why 
God is become man is for our salvation and happiness sake, 
that we should not turn back from His love." — [ Threefold 
Life, chap. 14, par. 71.] In this passage the connection of 
ideas is not evident until we remember the office of imagi- 
nation in re-moulding the attitude, and hence the "spirit of 
the soul," for, "mark this, every imagination maketh an 
essence." — [A Warning from J. B., par. 2.] To say noth- 
ing here of the far less comprehensible effects of the Word 
taking flesh upon Him, we can easily see how much a fel- 
low creature's example, greatly admired, tells upon the ideal 
of his admirers, and consequently upon their self-conduct. 
Jesus Christ gave the human race an absolutely new ideal. 
His forerunner announced that the Kingdom of Heaven was 
at hand, but He revealed the more important truth, "the 
Kingdom of God is within you." Into that Kingdom we 
enter so soon as we surrender ourselves to meekness and 
love; "in the love the fire dieth and transmuteth itself into 
joy." — [Apology 3 3 text 1, par. 58.] Yes! and therefore is 
the joy resulting in proportion to the dying of the kindled 
fire. 



Jacob Boehme 145 

But the habitual maintenance of love and meekness is, I 
suppose, a difficult achievement even to those who are 
constitutionally placable ; to people of irascible nature so 
extremely difficult as to call for the Biblical proviso, "If it 
be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all 
men." — [Rom. xii, 18.] With all men and at all times it is 
not possible, and for such exceptional cases Boehme gives 
a recipe which no one will ever try in vain. "If a fire 
riseth up in one qualifying spirit then that is not concealed 
from the soul. It may instantly awaken the other qualify- 
ing spirits which are contrary to the kindled fire, and may 
quench it. But if the fire will be, or become, too big, 
then hath the soul a prison, wherein it may shut up the 
kindled spirit, viz., in hard astringent quality" (which 
here I venture to explain to myself as in action and silence) 
"and the other spirits* must be the jailers, till wrath be al- 
layed and the fire be extinguished," . ... " but if the 
spirit breaketh out of prison, then put it in again, make 
good thy part against it as long as thou livest." — [Aurora, 
chap. 10, pars. 85, 86, 90.] 

I must diverge a little from the main line of this chapter 
to call attention to the way Boehme here contrasts the pow- 
er of the seven fountain Spirits with that of the soul, taking 
for granted its possible supremacy in every conflict. He 
here identities the soul and the will ; now as elsewhere the 
soul is spoken of as one with the seven Spirits of Eternal 
Nature, confusion of thought will result unless we care- 
fully bear in mind that he has shewn that this Eternal 
Nature was, and is, the consequence of the Abyssal Deity 
willing to manifest itself : the original of the human soul 
also was prior to its manifestation, for we are told that God 
breathed into man the breath of life — a life that must have 
preceded all nature and creature since it emanated from 
God, and made man to be in the likeness of God. Hence 
the much contested free-will of man which now fights at 
such tremendous odds against what we call fate; i.e., the 



146 Jacob Boehme 

forces of inferior beings raised by his fall, and insubordi- 
nation to comparatively superior power, may, in time, and 
as regards his external life to most undeniable superiority. 
Yet, notwithstanding all the opposition of the stars and the 
elements in his outer life, in the life within "all is possible ; 
as soon is the good changed into evil as the evil into good. 
For every man is free, and is as a God to himself, he may 
change or alter himself in this life either into wrath or into 
light." — [Aurora, chap. 18, pars. 42, 43.] 

An assertion that many will contradict, but one that 
should be taken as bearing upon the generality of human 
beings; not those who by long-continued indulgence of 
lowest instincts have lost, or by the hereditary penalties of 
ancestral vice have hardly ever attained, consciousness of 
their human birth-right. 

In one short sentence Boehme sums up what is in the 
power of every human being whose spiritual degradation 
is not yet complete. " Man hath the death in him, where- 
by he may die unto the evil." — [Signatura Rerum, chap. 
16, par. 28.] 

Incapable as the deeply corrupted may be of doing or 
feeling anything right, ceasing to do evil remains possible, 
and when this — the whole of man's share in working out 
his own salvation — is persisted in, the Divine spirit begins 
and carries on the new creation of regenerate life. This 
habitual death to the instigations of the divided properties 
or forms of nature in us, is the indispensable condition of 
any true life. "The curse of God," i.e., the withdrawal of 
God's holiness — wholeness of action — "is come into the 
seven forms so that they are in strife and enmity, and one 
form doth annoy the other, and can never agree unless they 
all seven enter into death and die unto the self-will. Now, 
this cannot be except a death come into them, which breaks 
all their will; as the Deity in .Christ was a death to the hu- 
man selfhood." — [Ibid, chap. 12, par. 30.] 

And had not Jesus Christ broken the rebellious will of 



Jacob Boehme 147 

the human selfhood in a true human soul, this death had 
not been possible to us: " For the soul, having sprung out 
of the Eternal source, and having its originality out of the 
eternity, none can redeem it in its own root of eternity, or 
bring it out of the anger, except there come one who is 
love itself and be born in its own very birth, that so he 
may bring it out of the anger and set it in the love in him- 
self, as it was done in Christ." . . . "We know very 
exactly that we could not be redeemed except the Deity 
did go into the soul, and bring forth the will of the soul 
again out of the fierceness in itself, into the light of the 
meekness ; for one root of life must remain or else the 
whole creature must be dissolved." — [ Three Principles, 
chap. 25, pars. 6, 8.] 

I hope that to any attentive reader of these attempts to 
explain the source of evil and sin, it may be said, "Seeing 
now we thus know what we are, and that God letteth us 
know it, we should now look to it and generate some good 
out of us, for we have the centre of Eternal Nature in us. 
If we make an angel out of us, then we are that ; if we 
make a devil out of us, then we are that." — [Incarnation, 
part 2, chap. 9, pars. 13, 14.] The all important question 
is how to make the angel. Let not our ability be doubted, 
if only the will be constant, for the spirit of man "is a 
son of the properties, and also a lord of the same, for in 
him consists the power; he may awaken which he please." 
— [Signatura Rerum, chap. 2, par. 25.] " For thou must 
know that in the government of thy mind thou art thine 
own lord and master, there will rise up no fire in thee in 
the circle or whole circumference of thy body and spirit 
unless thou awakenest it thyself." . . . "In whatever 
quality soever thou excitest or awakenest the spirit, and 
maketh it operative, according to that same quality the 
thoughts rise up and govern the mind. If thou stirrest or 
awakenest the spirit in the fire then there ariseth in thee 
the bitter and harsh anger, for as soon as the fire is kindled, 



148 Jacob Boehme 

which is done in the hardness and fierceness, then spring- 
eth up the bitter fierceness or wrath in the flesh." — [Aurora, 
chap. 10, pars. 69, 70, 81.] . . . "Be it in love or in 
anger, that which thou liftest up thyself towards or against, 
thou kindlest the quality of that, and that it is which burn- 
etii in thy compacted incorporated spirit. For when thou 
lookest upon anything which doth not please thee, but is 
contrary to thee, then thou raisest up the fountain of thy 
heart as when thou takest a stone, and therewith strikest 
fire on a steel, and so when the spark catcheth fire in the 
heart then the fire kindleth. At first it groweth, but when 
thou stirrest the source or foundation of the heart more 
violently, then it is as when thou blowest the fire, so that 
the flame is kindled, and then it is high time to quench it, 
else the fire will be too great and then burneth and con- 
sumeth, and doeth hurt to its neighbors." — [ Ibid, chap. 10, 
pars. 71, 72, 73.] 

A more wordy exposition of a notorious fact than the 
Apostle's " Behold how great a fire a little matter kindleth !" 
But he spoke of the effect of sparks escaping in utterance ; 
Boehme's object was to expose the forge on which they 
are first struck out. And here we have to remember that 
the kindling of wrath is not a mischief confined to one part 
of our being : in the words of St. James, " it setteth on fire 
the whole course of nature," (wheel, or birth of nature, it 
is in the revised translation of the New Testament, and 
this precisely harmonises with Boehme's account of it.) — 
[Aurora, chap. 16, pars, n, 12, 13.] "If a creature which 
is like or as the whole being of God, spoileth, elevateth, or 
kindleth itself in a qualifying or fountain spirit, yet it kin- 
dleth not one spirit alone, but all the seven spirits." — [Ibid, 
chap. 10, par. 7.] But how to prevent this kindling ! — " For 
out of the essences go the senses or thoughts ; they are and 
have their origin out of the harsh astringency ; for they are 
the bitterness and run always into the mind as an anguish 
wheel, and seek rest to try whether they may attain to the 



Jacob Boehme 149 

liberty of God. They are they which strike up the fire in 
the anguish wheel." . . . " They are the mind's ser- 
vants and are the subtlest messengers ; they go into God, 
and again out of God into necessity. And whereinsoever 
they kindle themselves, either in God or in necessity, viz., 
in falsehood or wickedness, that they bring home to the 
mind. Therefore must the noble mind often be lord over 
the evil and stifle it in its anguish, when the thoughts have 
entertained or loaden in false or evil imaginations into the 
desire."— [Incarnation, part 2, chap. 10, pars. 12, 17, 18.] 
But the exceeding difficulty of that stifling ! For while 
wrath lasts, we are animated by the eternal nature of wrath, 
which is incessantly giving birth to and substantialising its 
own creations, by reinforcements of justifying fancies ; and 
"in the eternal nature of the wrath, the light or the king- 
dom of Heaven is not known, and also in the eternal king- 
dom of light, the kingdom of wrath is not known, because 
each kingdom is in itself. So is the soul of man also : it 
hath kingdoms in it ; in which it tradeth, in that it stand- 
eth. If it trade in the kingdom of Heaven, then the king- 
dom of Hell is dead in it, not that it ceaseth, but the king- 
dom of Heaven is predominant, and the kingdom of fierce- 
ness is changed into joy ; so also if it trade in the kingdom 
of wrath, then that is predominant, and the kingdom of 
Heaven is, as it were, dead ; although, indeed, in itself, it 
doth not vanish, yet the soul is not in it." — [ Three Prin- 
ciples, chap. 22, par. 90.] And this trading of the mind is 
for the most part so blindly eager ! "If one property or 
quality ariseth and getteth above the other, then presently 
something followeth, so that the mind collecteth all its 
thoughts together and sendeth them to the members of the 
body, and so the hands and the feet, the mouth, and all go 
to work and do something, according to the desire of the 
mind, and then we say that form or property that directeth 
the work is predominant, qualifying, and working above 
other forms, wherein yet all other forms of nature lie yet 



150 Jacob Boehme 

hidden, and are subject to that one form ; and yet the mind 
is such a wonderful thing that suddenly (out of one form 
that is now predominant, and working more than all others ) 
it bringeth forth and raiseth another and quencheth the form 
that was kindled before, so that it becometh, as it were, a 
nothing, as may seem in joy and sorrow." — [Appendix to 
Three Principles, par. 3.] And in what is technically 
called conversion also. Transition from a hopeless sense of 
being driven to commit sin, and so strong a fear and loath- 
ing of it, however habitual, that it is shunned as the worst 
of evils, little as it is believed in by careless observers, is an 
historic fact in human nature, and is often as complete as it 
is sudden : — complete as regards a totally new starting point 
for the will, of course pitifully and most painfully incomplete 
as regards achievement of perfected conduct. Nor, when 
the dominion of each divided property is better understood, 
and the tyrannic power of rulers in their darkness more 
justly estimated, will the suddenness of conversion be so 
much a matter of surprise. 

Just in that power of suddenly eliciting the influences of 
quite another world of thought and feeling, i.e., another 
property of our nature, lie at once our greatest danger and 
our greatest ability to escape from it. As to the danger, let 
a lueifer box remind us how destructive a force may lie 
still and harmless while untouched, — force that once kin- 
dled by the slightest accident, will suffice to destroy in a 
few moments the noblest handiworks of many a toilsome 
year. An angry word, a scornful look can as quickly set 
the whole mind aflame : and then one mind sets fire to an- 
other, and all former growth in love or holiness seems for 
the time as if it had not been ; as we calm we are ready to 
think all good-will and trust destroyed as well as present 
peace. But though much is lost, and future risk greatly in- 
creased, relief may be as sudden. The anger into which 
we have entered is God's anger, and must therefore scourge 
and plague us powerfully. " His anger is His strength and 



Jacob Boehme 151 

omnipotence and consuming fire ; and His heart is His love, 
is His meekness, and so now that which approacheth and 
entereth into His anger is captivated in the anger. But it 
is possible to go out of the anger, as His dear heart is gen- 
erated in the anger, which stilleth the anger and is rightly 
called the Kingdom of Heaven." — [ Three Principles, chap. 
20, pars. 60 and 61.] 

Go out ? And how ? " When the soul inclineth itself 
at all towards God's face and doth but a little imagine into 
God's love, then the Divine life becometh stirring. — [Apol- 
ogy 1, part 2, par. 553.] And ''then the anger of God 
sinks down from the soul and so it is released or delivered 
in the love spirit from pain and lives in God." — [Doctrine 
of Election, chap. 10, par. 102.] " Hold fast," said Gichtel 
in one of his letters, " to love in your imagination ; nothing 
can take it from you but your own imagination. As soon 
as our imagination goes out of the love, darkness enters in- 
to the imagination, and the devil then has access." And 
again, "they knew from experience how easy it was to 
stumble and to fall by a thought from love into wrath, when 
the soul being plunged into a violent struggle has very hard 
work to recover its balance." 

In this inquiry into the nature of our unseen foes, I am 
considering them as abettors of evil in man, rather than his 
antagonists ; for into the mystery of their enmity to man, 
as such, I have here as little cause to enter as I have capacity 
for its comprehension. This much, however, is no sort of 
mystery, that the evil always detest the good, and try to 
bring down comparative innocence to their own state. 
There can be no doubt that this instinct for promoting 
wickedness is strong beyond our bounded scope of vision. 
And, among all the tender mercies of the Father of Spirits, 
I suppose none to be much greater than the concealment of 
cruel enemies, whose power to intimidate, even if not al- 
lowed to harass us otherwise, would be fully equal to their 
malice. While we are in the flesh we have a veil which 



i ^2 Jacob Boehme 

hides them from us, and, if Boehme did not mistake, many 
of us from them, unless fellow feeling gives them insight to 
us through our passions. Speaking of "a soul new-born 
in the light of God," he says : "The devil cannot see that 
soul, for the second principle wherein it liveth, on which 
God and the Kingdom of Heaven standeth, as also the 
angels and Paradise, is shut up from him, and he cannot 
get to it." — [ Three Principles, chap. 5, par. 5.] And again, 
when speaking of covetousness, " It is the eye of hell ; the 
devil seeth man therewith into soul and body." — [ Six 
Points, chap. 10, par. 48.] But, quite apart from hostility 
toman, the " wrath of nature wills to be manifested/' — 
[Election, chap. 8, par. 130.] And hence the terrific dis- 
cord of the divided forms of nature tends to continual in- 
crease, for " know and observe that every life standeth up- 
on the abyss of the fierceness." . . . "We all, in the 
originality of our life, have the source of the anger and of 
the fierceness, or else we should not be alive, but we must 
look to it and in ourselves go forth out of the source of the 
fierceness with God, and generate the love in us, and then 
our life shall be a joyful and pleasant habitation to us, and 
then it standeth rightly in the Paradise of God." "For 
God calleth Himself a consuming fire and also a God of 
love, and His name, God, hath its original in the love where 
He goeth forth out of the source in Himself, and maketh it 
in Himself joy, Paradise, and the Kingdom of Heaven." . 
. . " But if our life stay in the fierceness, or in covetous- 
ness, envy, anger, and malice, and goeth not forth into an- 
other will, then it standeth in the anguishing source as all 
devils do." — [Appendix to Three Principles, pars. 28, 29.] 
In that anguishing source are countless tormentors ; but 
they cannot approach us until we open what may compare 
to a sluice or dam of a river, rather than to a door, so great 
is the inrush as soon as it is made possible. "The devil 
continueth in his own dominion or principality, not indeed 
in that wherein God created him, but in the aching, painful 



Jacob Boehme 153 

birth of eternity, in the centre of nature and property of 
wrath ; in the property which begetteth darkness, anguish 
and pain." — [ On True Resignation, chap. 3, par. 8.] 

Now the soul of man necessarily shares that property 
with him ; it is the root of all creatural life. " The devil 
hath no authority or power over it, only that which is the 
source of anxiety in the soul is the very source or quality of 
his life." — [On the Complexions, chap. 4, par. 100.] And 
with this ocean of potential torment close about it, the soul 
is so lightly, quickly moved from one property to another, 
that a thought can do it. "The life of man in this time is 
like a wheel, where very suddenly that which is undermost 
becometh uppermost and kindleth itself in every creature." 
— [Point 2, par. 22.] We all know something of the daily 
marvels that result from this, and must have observed how 
entirely just, right, and inevitable anger and scorn, for in- 
stance, appear to us while they are felt ; how they seem to 
take intensifying colour from all that is occurring at that 
time, and how actually false to the truth of things a com- 
panion appears who condemns such feelings as misleading. 
" I do well to be angry ; I cannot but feel scorn ! " is what 
we feel. Now as with the rise of anger a whole spiritual 
world flies open to us, and in that world every wrathful 
thought is strictly in its own element, this temporary hallu- 
cination is quite intelligible. Il Alas," said Carlyle, writing 
to his mother, ''why should I dwell in the element of con- 
tempt and indignation rather than in that of patience and 
love?" (For the mind that is prone on all occasions to 
kindle into wrath on the slightest provocation, often abhors 
the folly.) Why ? Carlyle did not guess that in every ele- 
ment of contempt and indignation there are mighty con- 
federates ; that our own access to that element introduces 
us to their wrath, and this corroborates ours. As Boehme 
has it, " The darkness grasps the holy power" (i.e., deific 
powers in human nature) "and brings it into malignity, 
and then it is as the Scripture says, with the perverse thou 



i S4 Jacob Boehme 

art perverse, and with the holy thou art holy." — [ Election, 
chap. 8, par. 83.] "Thou" — God in man. In precisely 
the same manner, and v/ith the same plausibility., does every 
vice — covetousness, gluttony, lust, revenge — justify itself ; 
and every indulgence of either propensity strengthens its 
hold on the will and its certain velocity of increase. For 
"the image of the spirit of the soul" (that which desire 
and imagination tend to form ) " sticketh in the mind, and 
to whatsoever the mind inclineth and giveth up itself, in 
that is the spirit of the soul figured by the Eternal Fiat." — 
[ Three Principles, chap. 16, par. 43.] And if malignant or 
sensual properties have thus become creattirely in the hu- 
man soul, the difficulty of opposing them by any properties 
that have not is, of course, tremendously increased ; and 
when at last these evil properties rule, " l'horreur de la 
situation, c'est que c'est dans sa propre volonte que reside 
cette puissance la, et que sa volonte est soumise elle-meme 
a cette puissance qu'elle s'est cree et engendree." 1 

Therefore was our Saviour so stringent in requiring self- 
denial as indispensable to true life; "therefore, Christ so 
emphatically and punctually teacheth us in the new birth 
love, humility and meekness." . . . "For the desire 
of revenge ariseth in the centre of the dark fiery wheel of 
the Eternal Nature." . . . "And the soul's fiery form 
stands in the Racha as a mad, furious wheel which con- 
founds the essence in the body and destroys or shatters in 
pieces the understanding." — [Mysterium Magnum, chap. 
22, par. 62.] 

Now when our Lord said, " Whosoever shall say to his 
brother, thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire," human 
reason naturally understood a fire that was both external to 
the soul in present time, and occupying space in a future 

1 Translation : — And the horror of the situation is, that this power resides 
in one's own will and that one's will is itself subjected to this power, which 
itself has created and engendered. — L. C. St. Martin's L'Esprit des Choses, 
vol. 2, p. 315. 



Jacob Boehme 155 

world, and in earlier ages probably no ideas less childish 
could have taken hold on the gross intellect of unenlight- 
ened Christendom. But it is on the strength of such absurd 
and obsolete ideas that even now much ignorant talk about 
the disproportionate judgments of an "angry God" still 
gains a hearing. It is surely time for such false coin to be 
called in. Long ago Boehme taught what that hell-fire is, 
— latent in every soul, — making it obvious that if that con- 
suming and indestructible fire does not generate light and 
the meekness of light, it must torment with a famished de- 
sire for the bliss it cannot find. Let him explain himself as 
well as passages taken from their context can explain. "No 
creaturely spirit can subsist in the creature without the fire- 
world, for even the love of God could not be if His anger 
world were not in Him. The anger or fire of God is a 
cause of the light, and of the power, strength, and omnipo- 
tency." — [Apology 3, text 1, par. 57.] 

In all Boehme's writings he explains with most varied 
iteration that creaturely life begins in the sinking down of 
fire, calling it — [Election, chap. 3, par. 10] — "a birth of 
death, where yet not death, but the beginning of the life of 
nature exists." The beginning of life everlasting, of the 
creature that is new in the old Adamic nature, takes its rise 
in precisely the same process ; a death to the kindled fire of 
our evil passions, produces the light, and that ultimates its 
meek glory in the heavenly substance which is formed by 
the water of eternal life. The analogy is complete and 
exact. "In the outward world, in all creatures, every life, 
viz., the essential fire life, draweth substance to it, and that 
is its food to eat. And the fire of its life consumeth the 
substance, and giveth forth the spirit of the power out of 
that which is consumed, and that is the life of the creature. 
And you see, doubtless very rightly, how the life ariseth 
out of the death ; it becometh no life unless it break that 
out of which the lite should go forth. — [Incarnation, part 
2, chap. 5, pars. 46, 47, 48.] Now, "the centre out of 



156 Jacob Boehme 

which evil and good floweth is in thee ; that which thou 
awakest in thee, be it fire or light, that will be taken in 
again by its like, either by God's anger fire, or by God's 
light fire ; each of them electeth or chooseth to itself that 
which is like its property." — [Apology 1, part 1, par. 99.] 
"The wicked should not dare to say God makes me evil ; 
but the God in him, in Whose ground he stands, makes 
him what he can serve to be according to the utmost pos- 
sibility." — [Election, chap. 9, par. 26.] ''Power in the 
light is God's love-fire ; and the power in the darkness is 
the fire of God's anger ; and yet it is but one only fire ; but 
divided into two principles ; that the one might be manifest 
in the other, for the flame of anger is the manifestation of 
the great Love, and in the darkness the light is made known, 
else it were not manifest to itself." — [Mysterium Magnum, 
chap. 8, par. 27.] 1 pray seekers for the cause of permitted 
evil to pause a little on that last sentence. In the Third 
Theosophic Question, from pars. 26 to 45, this subject of 
the fire of God is made clearer, to my thinking, than in any 
other of Boehme's works. 

That the common notion of hell-fire as a punishment in- 
flicted on evil souls ab extra was allowed by the permissive 
providence of God, and for so many centuries, is a marvel, 
and must be a snare to those who receive the words of 
Scripture literally according to their surface meanings ; but 
it does not stand alone among the misunderstandings by 
which the Divine revelation has been obscured. And con- 
sidering that no truth for which the human mind at its 
present stage of growth is prepared, can be the whole truth, 
or any given point of spiritual wisdom, nor absolute truth 
free from the modifications a finite recipient unavoidably 
gives to it, we should probably be wiser if we expected, as 
the Swedenborgians do, a continual opening of quite new 
meanings of Scripture, as the mind of the race opens more 
and more to heavenly influx. 

But still, being ready to accept new meanings, and dis- 



Jacob Boehme 157 

missing old interpretations, are very different postures of 
mind, and one does wonder at Divine love conniving, so to 
speak, at human error, by permitting the messengers of its 
Gospel to use language that could not but justify the hor- 
rible creed of Calvin ; for example, St. Paul's sayings in 
Rom. ix, which have notoriously led hundreds of men and 
women to causeless despair, or to confidence almost as un- 
warrantable. From the 1 5th to the 24th verse of this chap- 
ter, every sentence seems calculated to confirm the terrible 
doctrine of irresistible predestination. Words could not, 
one would think, more distinctly imply an arbitrary will in 
the Most High God to cause some men to be vessels of 
wrath filled to destruction, in order "to make His power to 
be known." Yet, as this contradicts the whole tenor of 
the New Testament,, we know it cannot be a true inter- 
pretation ; nor can all the ingenuity of theologians, by any 
strain of argument, reconcile this chapter with the recorded 
teaching of Jesus Christ. It would be possible so to under- 
lie these words of St. Paul's with Boehme's elucidation as 
to bring them into a sort of harmony with his oft-repeated 
phrase about God's desire to manifest all the wonders of 
Eternal Nature. "The Word hath created a will in the 
darkness to manifest the darkness with all its forms of the 
wonders of God the Father." — [ Threefold Life, chap. 4, 
par. 21.] But this sort of process would not seem honest 
to me, since I think it quite clear that Paul himself as little 
understood the real meaning of the expression he refers to, 
"God hardened the heart of Pharaoh," as he understood 
the period indicated by Christ Jesus for his future visible re- 
turn ; and I, not believing that the Holy Spirit ceased to re- 
veal truth after the time of the Apostles, accept Boehme's 
account of those words as revelation, and am thankful 
thus, and only thus, to understand "whom He will He 
hardeneth." 

Duly to appreciate the following passage, his whole 
treatise, On the Election of Grace should be studied ; it is, 



is8 Jacob Boebme 

as a whole, quite irresistibly convincing. Commenting on 
it in Rom. ix, v. 21, he says : — "The false, or wicked 
and evil soul and the holy soul come both out of Adam's 
soul, as out of one lump or clod of ground ; which a man 
must understand to be spirit, or spiritually in the great 
mystery ; but the one separates or distinguishes itself into 
light, and the other into darkness. This potter makes out 
of every separation or distinction a vessel, such as to which 
the separated or distinguished matter is useful and fit." . 
. . "As the Ens of the soul is, such also is the will of or 
to the making. God sits not over the will and makes it as 
a potter does a pot, but he generates it out of his own 
properties." . . . "God works to the producing life 
out of everything ; out of the evil Ens an evil life, out of 
the good Ens a good life." — [chap. 9, pars. 4 to 11.] 

"The spirit without a body must remain in the fierce, 
wrathful fire, for it hath lost its substantiality. But the 
spirit with a body which the Turba is not able to devour 
remaineth eternally in the substantiality, in God's body, 
wherein His spirit standeth, viz., the body in the love of 
God, which is the hidden man in the Old Adamical, which 
there hath Christ's flesh in the corruptible or fragile body." 
— [Fourth Question, L., 308.] 

The nearness of the most opposite worlds within us is 
one of the most momentous facts to which we can become 
awakened. "All is nigh unto the spirit, but it may not 
see in any other world's property, but only in that wherein 
its fire burneth : that world alone is the spirit capable of," 
and — what is equally certain — "into which world now it 
uniteth itself and giveth up itself, from the same it getteth 
substance in its imagination." — [Fifth Point, chap. 7, pars. 
8 and 29.] 

We can understand this better by a little recollection of 
our own experience than by any words of another person ; 
this, and the possibility of being either inwardly transport- 
ed or tortured, during the dominancy of any one property 



Jacob Boehme 1S9 

ruling in us. Who has not known the common effects of 
some strong emotion making one feel, while in close com- 
panionship with other people, worlds away from their life, 
either rapt in secret consciousness of incommunicable joy, 
or sinking deeper and deeper in dismaying gulfs of sorrow, 
or torn by conflicts of unsuspected passion ! And in all 
these states we feel that we are both in a different phase of 
being, and a different phase of being in us, — that the 
emotion ruling within is reverberated from all sides with- 
out ; every sight and sound, as well as every turn of thought, 
adding to its strength either by contrast or by harmony. 
This, 1 suppose, is but a rehearsal of that state of self-de- 
termined consciousness which must be ours after death. 
Dionysius Freher explains it thus : "Compacted bodies or 
palpable materialities are only those things in temporal nat- 
ure which want or rather are themselves their own place, 
and make by their multiplicity and differences their dis- 
tances from one another, their own proper and peculiar 
corporeal extension in their only place. . . . Things, 
therefore, which have not, or have not yet, a compacted 
body, or are not yet limited to a certain extension, neither 
have nor require, or not yet, any place, but dwell only 
within themselves ; and as their own visible extension is 
afterwards their own corporeal place, so now their own in- 
visible original root or those radient properties out of which 
they have come into visibility and palpability is their own 
spiritual dwelling place. " ( It is in this sense, doubtless, 
that we are told of the traitor Judas that after he had hanged 
himself he went "to his own place.") 

This original root of all human life being indestructible, 
we can thus understand Swedenborg's report of man's 
spirit after death being, so to speak, in a wholly subjective 
condition, and yet conjoined to the society of spirits of 
which it was unconsciously a member before death. Death 
cannot remove us from the realm of that property of Eter- 
nal Nature to which our own will in this life has made us 



160 Jacob Boehme 

subjects. Only by the previous formation of the new 
creature (the regenerate) — be it but in feeble monage yet 
existant, in which all six first properties generate the 
seventh, the heavenly substantiality, — only in that eternal 
life can there be exemption from some over-ruling property 
of the un-at-one-ed "aching source of anguish which is 
called the anger of God." — [Regeneration, chap, i, par. 24.] 
And hence the terrors of death, for that wellspring "hath 
devils of such properties and names, which are also princes 
irt their legions, for they have imaged themselves in the 
hellish property. This ground is their life, and holds them 
captive in itself; and as the properties of the hellish foun^ 
dations are manifold, so also are such princes under them, 
ruling in the same properties." — [Eleventh Theosophic 
Question, pars. 7, 8.] Could those who dare to attempt 
dissolution by suicide but faintly imagine how unspeakably 
more cruel are the tyrannies of unseen powers, than any 
under which they groan, suicide would be unknown. For 
"the dark world's substance and dominion standeth prin- 
cipally only in the first four forms of Nature, in a very ex- 
ceeding strong and mighty potent dominion."— [ Sixth 
Point, chap. 9, par. 33.] It is the agent of the terrific 
world whom the Saviour commanded His disciple to fear. 
" He that hath power to cast into hell : yea, 1 say unto you, 
fear hint " ( speaking no doubt of a collective spirit as one ). 
And, again, "Give dilligence that thou mayest be delivered 
from him, lest he hail thee to the judge,"— the incorruptible 
judge of conscience — "and the judge deliver thee to the 
officer," — the executive property of torment inherent in sin 
-^-"and the officer cast thee into prison." — [ Luke xii, v. 5, 
58, 59.] The horrors of that prison he knew, and how 
long a period of purifying anguish of spirit must be en- 
dured, before there can be any departing thence, before 
"the very last mite" of the wages of sin has been paid in 
the convincing torment of self-condemnation. 

Though I cannot for one instant believe that the loss of 



Jacob Boehme 1 6 1 

our flesh husk in any way interrupts the outflow of ever- 
lasting love from the heart of God towards man, I have 
begun to see why such alarming stress has been laid upon 
the now of earthly life by inspired teachers as "the day of 
salvation," "the accepted time," when we can work for it, 
before the after period when we cannot. In this life we 
have a shelter, a hiding-place from the violence of mighty 
spirits deprived even of the external light we enjoy. Into 
our world these spirits of the dark world cannot look ex- 
cept through us ; "and therefore hath God introduced the 
soul into flesh and blood, that it might not so easily be 
capable of the fierce wrathful substance," (with which 
wrathful spirits always strive to enkindle others ; we have 
been taught quite recently to apprehend that there is sub- 
stance transmitted by all emotion ). " Also it hath its joy 
the while in the sidereal essence " — [ Fifth Point, chap. 7, 
par. 28] — and thus the evil fires of the soul are outshone. 
Again we have in the fleshly body an external life of our 
own on which the will can act, and — action and reaction 
being equal — this outward life reacts on the will, modifies, 
appeases, and even breaks it as the case may be. If anyone 
would duly estimate the helpfulness of a material body in 
this respect, let him just compare the different effects of a 
stinging recollection of angry thought occurring to the mind 
by night or by day. Even in the first case I think it will 
be found that generally the position of the body shifts as 
the painful impression recurs ; we turn round as if merely 
moving thus lessened or changed it ; and by day how many 
little distractions help us to manage anger better, to hold 
bitter thoughts in check. And not only does the activity 
of the body blunt internal feeling, but our rule over the 
body is so much more complete than our rule in the mind, 
that to prevent speaking angrily or acting unkindly is easy 
compared to getting rid of a vindictive wish or subduing a 
scornful impulse ; for in that attempt the higher will can 
only oppose the lower with intensely concentrated self- 
coercion. 



1 62 Jacob Boehme 

Now with full knowledge of the extreme uncertainty of 
our tenure of flesh bodies, and total ignorance of all the 
agressive powers that may beset us when cast out of these 
bodies by death, would it not be the work of good sense 
to try and procure another body impervious to all possible 
assaults in any state of being ? There is such a body. 
" There is an eternal in the temporal body, which verily 
disappeared in Adam as to the eternal light, which must 
also be born again through Christ." — [ Mysterh/m Magnum, 
chap. 8, par. 15.] 

"The new man is not only a spirit ; he is even flesh and 
blood, as the gold in the stone is not only a spirit ; it hath 
a body, but not such a one as the rude drossy stone is, but 
a body which subsisteth in the centre of nature, in the fire ; 
whose body the fire cannot consume." — [Incarnation, 
part 1, chap. 14, par. 22.] 

This gold, this heavenly substance, had been quite 
covered up by earthly matter, and no more grew in man ; 
but "the heavenly Artist would not reject Adam's disap- 
peared gold and make clean another new thing, but he took 
his own tincture of his own gold, out of which he had 
made Adam's gold, and tinctured it with his own gold, that 
is with the Word (viz., the power) of God and with the 
essence of the Word, viz., with the Heavenly corporality." 
— [ Mysterium Magnum, chap. 37, par. 31.] The translator 
thought good to render Wesen, which in German is both 
essence and substance — essence, but here undoubtedly sub- 
stance was intended. And what an unexamined mystery 
lies here ! No figure of speech, but a fact to which I sup- 
pose every advance in ontological research will testify, i.e., 
that no spiritual life, even the Divine, can be existant with- 
out the interaction of an active spirit, and a passive sub- 
stance. Now in man's nature, while full of discordant 
properties, there could not be any true substance till the 
"temperature" — the perfect equilibrium of all the forms of 
Eternal Nature — was restored. Therefore until the incar- 



Jacob Boehme 163 

nation of the Word or power of God, the new man was not 
possible. "Renew a right spirit within me," was David's 
prayer ; but now "if any man be in Christ" (the Anointed 
Humanity) " he is a new creature." The Holy Spirit did 
indeed act on the human will, influence and guide it previ- 
ously, but only with the new Adam could the new creation 
begin. Because wherever the Word is, there also is what 
Boehme elsewhere calls "the substantial Word." " With 
the substance of the Word, viz., the Heavenly corporality," 
the Word "came into the wrath of Eternal Nature, into the 
Father's property as to that nature, and regenerated the re- 
volted human will in the same fire through the love fire, 
and atoned God's love and anger, viz., the divided nature 
in the human will." — [ Mysterium Magnum, chap. 40, par. 

.0.] 

"When the body deceaseth, then the sunlight is de- 
stroyed, and the soul standeth naked in the dark world." 
( This is why the wrath is spoken of in the Bible as " the 
wrath to come " ; it is only fully felt then when all perish- 
able light, the matter for the fuel of the soul's fire, is with- 
drawn.) "Therefore God brought Divine substantiality 
into the faded image of man." — [Apology n, part 2, pars. 
516 and 517.] "The highest love of the Deity in the name 
Jesu, did overcome the anger of God in our soul and in- 
ward Divine ground, proceeding from the substance of 
Eternity, and did turn it again into Divine humility, meek- 
ness and obedience, whereby the rent, torn and divided 
temperature of our human property entered again into the 
harmony and unity of the properties, viz., into Paradisical 
light, love, and life, that real temperature where variety doth 
concentre and accord in unity." — [First Epistle, par. 12.] 

" Wilt thou not have thy soul, which is given thee from 
the eternal highest Good, here in this time kindled again in 
the light of God, so that it becometh born again in the light 
out of the Divine substantiality ; then it falleth in the 
mystery" (death) "to the centre of Nature, viz., home 



1 04 Jacob Boehme 

again into the anguish chamber of the first four forms of 
Nature. There it must be a spirit in the dark anguish source 
with all the devils, and devour that which it hath in this 
world introduced into itself : that will be its food and life. 
But being God would not have it thus with man, his simil- 
itude and image, therefore he himself is become that which 
poor man was come to be, after that he was fallen out of 
the Divine substantiality, out of Paradise, that he might 
help him again ; so that man hath in himself the gate of re- 
generation, that he can in the soul's fire become born again 
in God ."— [ Incarnation, part 2, chap. 6, pars. 38-40.] 



READY-MADE CLOTHES 

Probably most readers of Light have been puzzled at some 
time or other by the well-known trick of communicating 
spirits announcing themselves as distinguished people, and 
have now and then felt, while reading some deeply interest- 
ing message from hidden spheres, what the French call a 
retour sur soi-meme, when the unseen informant adds that 
it comes from Confucius, Plato, or Kepler, as the case may 
be. Indeed, one turns back rather sharply on such oc- 
casions to intuitive common-sense, feeling as if willingness 
to believe had carried one away a little too far. Yet very 
often communications so suspiciously endorsed seem other- 
wise to bear the impress of veracity. How is it, one asks, 
that any gleam of truth can reach us combined with evident 
or presumable falsehood ? Swedenborg's assertion that the 
habitual mendacity of spirits exceed all that we are familiar 
with on our own plane of being, has never given me a 
satisfying key to the enigma : it only suggests another, 
Why are they so fond of fibs ? Among ourselves they are 
seldom without motive ; vanity, malice, or self-interest of 
some kind prompting untruth ; and among the crowds 
which throng the accessible approaches to minds in the 
flesh, tricksy and malevolent spirits can hardly be so many 
as the boundlessly false appear to be ; what, therefore, can 
be the temptation ? Only a few days ago I chanced on a 
saying of Swedenborg's, in a book of his not seen before, 
which gave me a glimpse of a reason. " It is," he says, 
"a peculiar circumstance in the spiritual world that a spirit 
thinks himself to be such as is denoted by the garment he 
wears, because in that world the understanding clothes 



1 66 Jacob Boehme 

everyone." Now, it has long been understood that the 
contents of a medium's mind always more or less modify 
every utterance given through it ; thus the informing spirit 
uses what he finds there. May there not be unintentional 
assumption of an ideal character found in the mind of a 
medium ? The rule which this great seer tells us obtains 
in spirit-world is continually exemplified in our own : as re- 
gards the clothing of our bodies, the body's mimetic repre- 
sentation of feelings, and the dressing up by imagination of 
the Conscious Ego, any one may prove it by observing what 
takes place within and without. A soldier in full uniform, 
a bishop in lawn sleeves and apron, an ill-dressed or well- 
dressed woman, all feel themselves to be what their gar- 
ments denote in a much stronger degree than reason alone 
can justify ; and both actors and painters know well that 
to simulate gestures of passion is to induce emotional ex- 
citement ; of varying intensity, of course ; but invariably 
attitude and gesture will — in some measure — confirm the 
state of mind which it interprets externally. A remark of 
the late Mr. W. Bagehot exemplifies this very neatly. 
"Lord Chatham was in the habit of kneeling at the bed 
side of George the Third while transacting business. Now 
no man can argue on his knees. The same feeling which 
keeps him in that physical attitude will keep in a corres- 
ponding mental attitude." — [English Constitution, p. 86.] 
Quite as certain it is that we all live up, or down, to our 
imaginations of what we are. With two such good au- 
thorities as Jean Paul Richter and Novalis to vouch for this 
fact, it is needless to try and make good the point. The 
one says, " Whoever remarks to a man, and much more to 
a woman, 'you are certainly cross or angry,' will find such 
useless plain speaking verified, even if it be not true at first. 
One so easily becomes that which we are taken to be." 
And Novalis still more boldly tells us, "If a man could all 
at once verily believe he was a moral man, he would be- 
come such." In each case the ready-made garment of 



Jacob Boebme 167 

imagination dominates consciousness. Now would this 
surprise us if we had any adequate idea of the creative force 
of imagination. By it, according to Boehme, the eternal 
and temporal world came into existence : the imagination 
of the supreme abyssal Deity in the first case, and that of 
spiritus mundi in the other, producing all that is. 

But what concerns us more practically is the warning he 
gives as to its momentous effects in the microcosm. " The 
soul," he tells us, "must have magic food, viz., by or with 
the imagination ... it must draw in substance into 
itself through its imagination, else it would not subsist." — 
[ Incarnation, part 1, chap. 4, par. 46, and chap. 5, par. 88.] 
Can these sayings of his throw any light on the love of 
personation so common among those who speak behind 
the veil of our grosser embodiments ? Is it that they, having 
lost material bodies and not attained true enduring substance 
for the soul's magic food, are like people trying on one suit 
of clothes after another, when assuming characters, in hope 
of finding some that can satisfy imagination ? I think self- 
love in the flesh knows something of that process now and 
then ; and what a weariness constant change of its imagi- 
native clothing becomes as time goes on ! One day it all 
seems so poor and trumpery — the next, its tinsel glitters 
like gold ; the inflation of self-importance so occupying ! 
the shrunken squalor of self-contempt causing so much dis- 
may ! We have all of us a strong reminder of the risks of 
desirous imaginations in our present bodies, for it was " the 
will " of our first progenitor that did ff imagine into this 
monstrous property " — [ Mysterium Magnum, chap. 22, par. 
19] — of gross flesh and blood, and the worst of the danger 
is in the reaction of body on the spirit. "The form im- 
pregnateth its imagination" — [Incarnation, part 2, chap. 3, 
par. 7] — as surely as that fashions the form, and as "the 
essence is in the body even so the spirit doth figure and 
form itself internally." — [Mysterium Magnum, chap. 20, 
par. 37.] The imagination once established, " the phantasy 



1 68 Jacob Boehme 

receiveth nothing into itself, but only a similitude or thing 
like itself, and that likeness is the power of its life." — 
[ Treatise on Election, chap. 4, par. 122.] 

Nor does the danger stop there. Adam's lapse of imagi- 
nation (I speak as the convinced disciple of Boehme) 
brought all the race into what he so truly calls "the stage 
play of the self-hood of nature," — [Ibid. chap. 4, par. 60] 
— and in every part of that play we have most accomplished 
prompters behind the scenes in the victims of an antecedent 
rebellion. "The devil," said Gichtel, "is anxious about 
our soul's imagination ; he understands it better than we." 
If by any allurement of other magic he can famish our souls 
by hindering them from " imagining a little into the love of 
God," suitable sorceries for that end will be ever fresh and 
strong : and by the conventional he, I mean a host inimical 
to man from envy of his potential supremacy. The Father 
of Spirits knew how this would be, and has in mercy given 
us a perfect pattern of what man should be, and must be, 
to become wholly a man and no longer a confused creature, 
doubtful alike of his origin and his destiny, ready to believe 
himself the transient outcome of the forces of Nature — a 
passive irresponsible link in the chain of cosmic evolution. 
Especially in these days, when society echoes with a multi- 
tude of voices decrying all old phases of belief, and litera- 
ture besets us with a tangle of theories only agreeing in the 
destructiveness of negation ; when old habits of thought 
have been torn to rags, and souls shiver in the comfortless 
wastes of doubt. 

Any one who has known what it is to feel in a chaotic 
state of undefined purposes, driven here and there by con- 
flicting impulses, and fruitless agitation of thought, will 
understand the sort of help which is afforded by a ready- 
made ideal of what one ought to be, — a firmly settled mould 
into which thought can at once subside. Roman Catholics 
will understand it ; but we need more than Papal authority 
can offer ; we want clothing for self which death cannot re- 



Jacob Boebme 169 

move, nor sickness discredit. It is just this which the ex- 
ample and counsel of our Divine elder brother supplies. 
Let us. take it direct from Him in its simplest principle of 
filial obedience and the humility which is the sine qua non 
of all persistent love — ( "the throne of love is humility") 
— for verily all the disguising modifications given to the 
character of the Lord Christ by scores of small-minded zeal- 
ots have done much to disfigure it in modern views. The 
habits of that brother are ready for our ideal outfit at any 
moment, and are such as all of us can adopt ; for He having 
worn the rough wrappings of our flesh knew what is in 
man in that condition, and exactly measured our need, — - 
need of peace, and motive force that cannot fail of its ob- 
ject. That "the life of man is a form of the Divine will" 
— [ Divine Vision, chap. 2, par. 2 ] — was the great truth to 
which His whole life gave witness. Surely it would go far 
toward helping us to maintain cheerfulness and fortitude, 
at all times, if we would accept all that is unchosen and in- 
evitable in our lot as a manifestation of the permissive will 
of God, as the place in life's battle where we are to hold 
the ground for Him, and conquer by patience and meek- 
ness of wisdom. Volition can reach this much of the gar- 
ment of the Christ ; at any time by exerting the magic fire 
of the soul it can compel itself to be dumb under insult and 
wrong, and refrain from accusation and threats while suf- 
fering. And if Boehme was not mistaken there is no time 
to lose in trying thus to clothe ourselves with humility — 
(the most comfortable and becoming wear if people would 
but try it ! ) — for he says : " In whatsoever essence and will 
the soul's-fire liveth and burneth, according to that essence 
is also the fiat in the will-spirit, and it imageth such an 
image : so now when the outward body deceaseth, then 
standeth that image thus in such a source and quality. In 
the time of the earthly life it may alter its will and then al- 
so its fiat altereth the figure ; but after the dying of the body 
it hath nothing more wherein it can alter its will." — [First 



170 Jacob Boehme 

Apology, part 2, par. 266.] Why not after the outer body's 
death ? Because, as he and Swedenborg both assure us, 
with the body we lose the power of restricting our thoughts, 
wills, and opinions to ourselves ; we become a part, so to 
speak, of a common-stock mind, that of a society unseen 
here, to which we have belonged — but unconsciously by 
virtue of our most interior life — while believing our spirits 
alone. I entreat attention to the inferential meaning of 
those words "in such a source or quality." Quality, ac- 
cording to Boehme, is an equivalent to the German word 
Quell, a spring or source. The outcome of every source 
is not confined to present time, is not limited, is not easily 
exhausted. If we carry with us into another world a source 
of misery in any vicious quality not transmuted as in this 
life, it may be, we must expect copious floods of anguish. 
If it is well now, it will be unimaginably, blissfully well 
beyond the short road across which we pass on earth, to 
have accepted the durable, close-fitting simplicity of the 
raiment of Christ. " God's substance/' said Boehme, "is 
humility." — [Treatise on Election, chap. 7, par. 152.] This 
explains a little how it was that while He Who came to 
rescue us from the masquerade of evil powers truly des- 
cribed Himself as being meek and lowly ; He could an- 
nounce, when quit of coarse flesh and blood disguise, that 
to Him was given " all power both in Heaven and earth." 



IMAGINATION AND PHANTASY 

" It matters not what our wills and imaginations are employed about ; 
wherever they fall and dwell, there they kindle a fire, and that becomes the 
flame of life, to which everything else appears as dead. . . That which 
concerns us therefore is only to see with what materials our prevailing fire of 
life is kindled."— [W. Law's Appeal to all that Doubt, pp. 307-309.] 

While writing on these subjects I am aware that my treat- 
ment of them is as insufficient as the babble of a child, and 
that where I seem to myself to think clearly on the surface 
of depths unsearchable, that clearness is probably more due 
to ignorance than to knowledge. Minds scantily furnished 
with received ideas, and saturated with the less restrictive 
teaching of intuitional seers, are prone thus to presume. 
But what still emboldens me to do what I can with their 
dicta is the conviction that tentative outlines of thought, if 
but firmly and clearly presented, may serve as skeleton 
maps serve in the school-room. They do not pretend to 
suffice ; they only make ready a frame for larger knowledge 
to fill up. 

Boehme and Swedenborg agree in reprobating Phantasy. 
The first assigns to the arch rebel ''the kingdom of phan- 
tasy," because, breaking the harmony of the seven spirits 
of God's eternal nature, ( I italicise the word as a reminder 
that they cause an eternal "coming" to be in ceaseless in- 
teraction) he "introduced the eternal will out of the tem- 
perature into division, viz., — into the disharmony of the 
phantasy ; which phantasy instantly seized upon him, and 
therein brought him into an unquenchable cold and hot fire 
source, into the opposition and contrariety of the forms and 



172 Jacob Boehme 

dispositions." ! For the wrath of the eternal nature, which 
is called God's anger, manifested itself in them ( notice the 
plural pronoun ; all those forms became creaturely) and 
brought their will into the phantasy ; and therein they still 
live, and can now do nothing but what the property of the 
phantasy is, viz., practise foolery, shows, tricks, metamor- 
phose themselves, destroy and break things ; also elevate 
themselves in the might of the cold and hot fire, frame and 
will in themselves, to go forth above the hierarchies of God, 
viz., — the good angels." — [Election, chap. 4, pars. 72, 73, 

74-] 

In another of his works Boehme credits these slaves of 
phantasy with originating the changeful fashions of dress 
that so often disfigure womankind, and indeed there has 
been much of late in the monstrous projections and eleva- 
tions of its style to make one ready to believe it. 

To sum up all, the self-will of the creature "set the 
phantasy in the place of God, and then the Holy Spirit de- 
parted from its nature, and now it is a spirit in its own 
self-will, and is captivated in the phantasy as we perceive 
in Adam. Now when the root of the soul, through the 
devil's inspiration or infection, elevated itself, then the 
Holy Spirit departed into his own principle, and so Adam 
became weak in the image of God, viz., in the temperature ; 
and could not in the similitude, magically bring forth his 
like out of himself." — [Ibid, chap. 6, pars. 93, 94.] 

( Swedenborg's definition of image as the spiritual, and 
likeness as the celestial, representative of God is worth 

1 " Consider, there are two forms of fire, a hot and a cold." — [ Threefold 
Life, chap. 8, v. 41.] " According to the dark impression a cold fire and a 
false light arising through the imagination of the harsh impression, which light 
hath no true ground. The lot fire hath a fundamental light arising from the 
original of the divine will, which doth also bring itself forth in nature through 
the fire into the light." — [ Sixth Epistle, pars. 29 and 30.] 

This is Boehme's own account of the two fires, so unintelligible to me that 
sometimes I have thought, does he thus indicate what we call negative and 
positive electricity ? 



Jacob Boehme 173 

remembering here). 

In these two passages the most important doctrines of 
Boehme are comprised, and the essential difference of phan- 
tasy and true imagination implicit. Man was destined, in 
the kingdom of a great dethroned angel, to generate a race 
manifesting God, as His delegate and representative. The 
phantasy to which he became subject is but "a theatric 
play of the geniture," — [Ibid, chap. 4, par. in] — because 
it can never evolve light and heavenly substance without 
which God cannot be revealed to the creature. The " phan- 
tasy only imageth or formeth itself ; and now that phantasy 
receiveth nothing into itself but only a similitude or thing 
like itself ; and that likeness is the power of its life. If any- 
thing else did come into it then the phantasy must cease 
and vanish, and then would that vanish with it, out of 
which it is generated, viz., nature ; and if nature did cease 
and vanish away, then the Word of the Divine power would 
not be speaking or manifest, and God would remain hid- 
den." — [Election, chap 4, par. 122.] 

There is given to reflective thought the cause of the 
necessity of the Redeemer of our race coming to it in a 
similitude — in the disguise of our phantastically monstered 
human nature. Had He come to our world even in its 
pristine glory, the consuming fire of His Divine love would 
have destroyed the object of salvation. But the Word was 
made flesh, and ''re-out" spoke everlasting love, in the 
flesh, dwelling among us amid the phantasies of earthly 
life, till the imagination of man was once more quickened 
in "the looking-glass" of Deity. 

"The new fountain of Divine love and unity hath with 
its outflowing, in Christ incorporated itself into the true 
life of the three principles of the human property, and is 
entered into the imaginary thoughts, into the natural creat- 
urely apostated image-like will of the life and assumed hu- 
manity ; and broken the selfhood and own self-willing with 
the inflowing of the sole and only love of God, with the 



174 Jacob Boehme 

eternal one, and inclined or turned in the will of the life 
again into the Temperature: where then the devil's intro- 
duced will became destroyed, and the painfulness of the 
life became brought into the true rest." — [Divine Vision, 
chap. 2, par. 14.] 

Throughout his Spiritual Diary Swedenborg tells of 
Phantasy in various aspects — as a means of discipline carried 
on by Divine wisdom through the permitted agency of 
" castigating spirits" often cruel in their mode of inflicting 
torture. And "the cruelty of the infernals can never be 
described ; they act from phantasy in a most cruel manner 
against others, upon whom they practise such cruelties that 
if they were described they would cause horror." . . . 
"For such is the power of phantasies among souls that 
they can induce, as it were, a bodily sensation, and thus 
excruciating pains." [No. 374.] "It is wonderful that 
souls and spirits have sense (or sensation) altogether as in 
the body — thus they have the sense of touch, as when they 
touch their garments. In like manner as to cupidities and 
appetites, heat, cold, yea perspiration, which are as actual 
as in the body, when, nevertheless, they cannot be other- 
wise called than phantasies ; but inasmuch as the sense is 
real, such as it is in the body, they are, as it were, real sen- 
sations. These and similar things are induced upon spirits 
by an imaginative direction." [No. 364. See also 376.] 
"Unless the Lord should take away their phantasies, their 
corporeal things thus remaining in their minds, they would 
be tormented with much severer anguish than in their 
bodies ; for evil spirits and the diabolic crew not only have 
such phantasies, but they inflict the like upon the minds of 
those whom they torment, which, unless the Lord took 
away and moderated, they would have a hell vastly more 
excruciating than would ever be possible from their bodies 
being held in the suffering of the most intense anguish." 
[No. 1720.] 

Our recently acquired knowledge of hypnotic experiments 



Jacob Boehme 175 

should enable us to believe this. By bending, or removing 
phantasies, Swedenborg tells us in the same book, gradual 
reformation in vicious spirits is effected, for with his usual 
sagacity he sees these phantasies to be so much a constit- 
uent of man's present nature on either side of death, that it 
would not be safe to remove them suddenly. 

"At the present time," he wrote in 1747, "when there 
is no faith, and when scarcely anyone can be prepared for 
Heaven in the earth-life (he says, other life, referring to this 
from a transmundane position), because they are in an in- 
verted order of life, there is nothing but mere phantasies or 
hallucinations of the senses, which remain in souls, or in 
their natural mind, in the which the life of the man living 
at the present time chiefly consists. This natural mind, 
full of so many phantasies, is not broken, that is, its phan- 
tasies cannot be shaken off and extinguished, for in 
this case the man himself would be broken down, and 
nothing as to his sensitive life would remain ; for this life 
is composed of mere phantasies — a fact which from many 
things is so evident that no doubt can be entertained on the 
subject. There is an insanity in all things which compose 
and govern the life of man." [ No. 426.] 

Indirect confirmation of that saying, " phantasies cannot 
at once be shaken off, for in this case the man himself 
would be broken down," seems to me to have been given 
by the fact which Sir A. Helps noticed some thirty years 
ago in the Spanish Conquests in America, that "native 
tribes die out so soon as their ideas are conquered." As- 
suredly whenever habitual belief is sapped by misgivings 
the whole inner man is weakened and a state of nervous 
collapse results, which must injure bodily health. 

"The deep sea of love is a leaven of fire, which shall 
break the adamantine nature in the man of sin, in both 
worlds ; for it spreads itself over all worlds and reduces 
everything into the pure being and nature of God. Such is 
the true nature and property of Love." — [Jane Lead.] 



176 Jacob Boehme 

"Christ, the inbreathed Word, Who only can reach the 
soul's original ground, being the creating Fiat, can alone 
make all new again." — [Jane Lead.] 

Swedenborg seems to have noticed the surface similarity 
and intrinsic difference of phantasy and imagination, for in 
No. 3, 172 of his Spiritual Diary we find, " I spoke with a 
spirit concerning phantasies, yea, with those who supposed 
that they were wholly corporeal men, although they knew 
they were spirits" . . . " it was granted to tell him 
that man seems to live for himself, and yet it is such a 
phantasy, and that it is not wonderful that there exists 
phantasies concerning the body and corporeal things so long 
as that phantasy of living in or from himself remains. 
Afterwards we spoke concerning angelic representations, 
that still they are not, although they appear. Concerning 
which it was granted to say, that such things are imagina- 
tions, or representative imaginations signifying celestial and 
spiritual truths, and are thus exhibited to angels and angelic 
spirits. Wherefore they are not phantasies, for they feel 
them and are intimately delighted with them. Such de- 
light and felicity cannot come from any other source than 
from the truths of faith which are therein." 

And of useful phantasies he tells valuable truth in this 
other entry. " Spirits seem to themselves to dwell in houses 
and bed-chambers, and these indeed well furnished with 
utensils of every kind, and also with indefinite variety ac- 
cording to each one's inclinations ; thus because initiated 
into the like, during the life of the body, they also retain 
after life, and desire similar things ; thus the like are granted 
them with indefinite variety according to each one's genius, 
and thus they are bent to good, for they arrange those 
things according to uses which the Lord disposes, and at 
the same time the use introduces quiet and innocence in 
their minds. Thus also peace and innocence are insinuated." 
[Nos. 2,447 an d 2,448, vol. 2.] . . . "They do not 
stand in want of all these things in the other life ; where- 



Jacob Boehme 177 

fore such a cupidity is false ; but to receive such things as 
have been mentioned, from the Lord, and to arrange them 
according to use in tranquillity and innocence, this is the 
chief est reality, because it conduces to their felicity. Such 
imaginations so-called are real, because they have real things 
in th em selves. " x [No. 2,449.] 

( This is a lesson which many a discontented heart might 
profit by, before carrying its poison into the world of 
spirits.) 

Here we have the vital distinction between phantasy and 
imagination vividly lit up. Contentment and consequent 
happiness are real, they proceed from facts ; such and such 
pleasant phantasies are received from the Lord and tend to 
use. Compared with these, a phantasy proper is what the 
lovely vegetation seen in mirage is to the produce of fertile 
soil. The first must perish fruitless of all but deceiving 
and disappointment. It is but a seeming thrown upon 
barren ground by transient influences, — it is not generated. 
This is the difference emphatically marked in all Boehme 
says about imagination ; so far from confounding it with 
any delusions he says, ''the Magia is the greatest hidden 
secret, for it is above Nature, and maketh Nature according 
to the form of its will " — and after a profound analysis of its 
efficacy in the antecedents of Nature, he gives the key to 
his frequently asserted problem that "all things arose from 
Divine imagination " in these few words, " The Magia is 
the acting in the will-spirit, or the performance in the spirit 
of the will." . . . "This magic will which yet stick- 
eth in the desire, may image itself in the looking-glass of 
the wisdom how it will, and as it imageth itself in the 
tincture, so it is comprehended in the jMagia and brought 
into a substance." — [Fifth and Sixth Point, pars. 88, 89.] 

Tincture here means the light proceeding from the soul's 
fire, it is the most mysterious force in nature, and here only 
this much can be offered to explain it — Boehme's own 

1 Italics are mine, where the point in question is specially impressed. 



178 Jacob Boehme 

definition in his Explanation of the Table of the Three Prin- 
ciples: — "Tincture is the separable word out of which the 
seven properties" — those of Eternal Nature — "flow forth." 

[Par. 41.] 

This separable word, man's will re-out speaking itself as 
"a child of the omnipotency," forms into a substance in a 
surrounding plenum of what St. Martin calls " Matieres 
Spiritueuses." For every "imagination desireth only sub- 
stance in its likeness wherein it doth exist," — [Point II, of 
Six Small Points, par. 21 ] — and it is by the strength of its 
desire the performance, not the mere project of the will. 
It is a forcible laying hold of impressions which, without a 
determinate vigour, would pass away like the shapes of 
fleeting clouds ; and the will must be as steadily fixed, 
while imagining, as one point of the compass if the other 
is to trace the desired circle. It is to this central point that 
Boehme refers when he says, "in every will of every 
essence, there is again a centre of a whole substance." — 
[ First of Fourth Qitestions, par. 115.] 

Now the centre that generates substance must, according 
to his showing, be a fire: the will in the last analysis, is 
the soul's fire, and its light, and consequently the substance 
produced from light, depends on what fuel of imagination 
that fire is fed by. Let him explain himself here. "The 
fire of the soul must have the right fuel or wood, if it be to 
give a clear, bright, and powerful light ; for from the soul's 
fire, God's Spirit in its power becometh separable, distinct, 
and manifest in the nature of the soul : as the light is mani- 
fested from the fire, and as the air is manifested from the 
fire and light, and as a subtle dew or vapour goeth forth 
from the air, which becometh substantial after its going 
forth, whence the light draweth the power and virtue again 
into itself for its food" . . . "so in like manner can 
Christ in Man not be manifested, though indeed he be in 
man and draweth and calleth him, also presseth himself in- 
to the soul, unless it eat of the fiery Ens ( of his love) into 



Jacob Boehme 179 

its property . . . and then out of the soul's fire, the 
right divine air spirit goeth forth out of the fire and light, 
and bringeth forth its spiritual water out of itself out of the 
light, which becomes substantial ; whereof the power of the 
light eateth, and in the love desire introduceth itself into a 
holy substance therein — viz., into a spiritual corporeity, 
wherein the Holy Trinity dwelleth, which substance is the 
true temple of the Holy Ghost." — [Election, chap. 8, pars. 
231, 234, 238.] It is difficult to me to stop short in such 
quotations — so helpful and enlightening is the context ; and 
one sighs to remember how few can ever read it — even of 
those who fain would. It was in deference to this spiritual 
corporeity that J. G. Gichtel said when speaking of his con- 
ternpories : "The inner body of virtue is dead ; they are 
but skeletons of men." And it is because the rebel angel 
and his host fired their imagination with proud desires, and 
lost the only light that can produce enduring substance — for 
they have but flashes of unsteady light — that they long to 
be creaturely, to have something like substance for their 
unquiet souls to exist in. "Our selfhood hath no true Ens 
wherein its light may be steadfast ; for it createth with its 
desire not out of the Eternal One, viz., out of God's meek- 
ness, but createth itself into substance, its light originateth 
only in the substance of the selfhood." x "Light in all 
forms is the master," Boehme says elsewhere, "for it has 
the meekness," — [Incarnation, part 3, chap. 5, par. 40] — 
and "meekness maketh substantiality." 

How literally true this is it is not here the place to show ; 
his writings will do that — especially in the Treatise on 
the Incarnation, part 1, chap. 5, pars. 67 to 72. I can 
fancy how scientific readers may smile derisively at all this ; 
but perhaps he knew something of science though not of 
our scientific formulae. Sir Isaac Newton was glad to 
borrow from him one of his most valued theories. The 

1 Brief Explanation of the True and False Light, par. 35. Almost word for 
word, the same as Sixth Epistle. 



180 Jacob Boehme 

general reader, too, would say, of course, what absurdity 
to suppose that all this goes on when we feel nothing of it. 
But while so many vital processes of our animal life go on 
unfelt, it is unreasonable to think that accretions of growth 
in the immortal body are likely to be perceived. Neverthe- 
less there must be a conscious death of the apostate self- 
will before the Divine word can re-outspeak itself in the 
soul. That habitual self-suppression, that resolved dying 
to sin is now all the human will can do towards the re- 
birth of the image of God. 

The practical issues of these doctrines are momentous. 
''Every will hath a seeking to do or to desire somewhat, 
and in that it beholdeth itself, and seeth in itself in the 
eternity, what itself is ; it maketh to itself the looking-glass 
of its like, and then it beholdeth itself what itself is, and 
so finding nothing but itself, it desireth itself." — [ First of 
Forty Qtiestions, par. 22.] 

If in every world we are liable to find nothing but our- 
selves, the unspeakable foliy of setting our hearts upon 
external goods comes into clearest light. What we have, 
however delighting and desirable, is truly a matter of small 
importance compared to what we are, and if we could but 
see it, the habits of our mind, our thoughts, wishes, and 
aspiration are really bills of exchange upon our future lot, 
be it on this or the other side of bodily dissolution. A 
trick of being discontented with such things as we have is 
a flaw in our looking-glass which no change of existence 
can remove ; it is a defect in our own hearts which will 
come before us wherever we may be till humility and love 
have been made magical by the "spirit of the will." If we 
knew all the ramifications of cause and effect in external 
circumstances, I believe we should discover that they are 
not only more of a response to secret desires, but a truer 
reflection of character, than we generally suppose — ante- 
natal character some will say. But short of that length of 
causation, all might allow it if, besides seeing how charac- 



Jacob Boehme 181 

ter moulds events, we could estimate the impetus given to 
every turn of events favouring its peculiarities by accom- 
plices unseen. For our wills attract others in the same 
cupidity. The immediate coalescence of chemical atoms 
that have affinity one with another may give some notion 
of how instant and how strongly inviting and intensifying 
such attraction may be. Every human being is a mighty 
magnet, and, the will once determined, legionary subject 
spirits rush into coalition. We were lost if the Love which 
is the life of the world of light were not as eager to combine 
with the faintest beginnings of spiritual rebirth : and cruel, 
though so often an unconscious wrong, is the word or look 
from a human being which imperils that in the soul of an- 
other ; for "the fiery essence of the soul figureth an image 
for the soul, according to its imagination in the will." — 
[ Appendix to Forty Questions, par. 29.] To throw upon 
the looking-glass of another an evil or dispiriting repre- 
sentation of the soul that there seeks itself, is to do much 
to poison the will, and deface its fair image, so fragile, so 
unsubstantiated still ! Hence the inexpressible importance 
of fixing imagination on Divine love. " Whereinto a spirit 
introduces its longing imagination, the essence and prop- 
erty of that it receiveth in the great mystery of all beings." 
— [Signatnra Rerum, chap. 16, par. 25.] 

" Hold fast to love in your imaginations," says Gichtel, 
with the eagerness of a long-experienced victor over wrath. 
" Nothing can take it from you but your own imagination : 
as soon as our imagination goes out of the love, darkness 
enters the imagination." Merciful heaven, let this be be- 
lieved ! Let it not pass away from the thought as a mere 
opinion ! For as "all things are generated out of imagi- 
nation, so also the soul shall receive its property in the im- 
agination : and every imagination reapeth its own work which 
it hath. wrought." — [Ibid, chap. 15, par. 41.] 



SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION 

God giveth power to every life, be it good or bad, unto each thing, ac- 
cording to its desire, for He Himself is All ; and yet He is not called God ac- 
cording to every being, but according to the light wherewith He dwelleth in 
Himself, and shineth with His power through all His beings. He giveth in 
His power to all His beings and works, and each thing receiveth His power 
according to its property ; one taketh darkness, the other light ; each hunger 
desireth its property, and yet the whole essence or being is all God's be it evil 
or good, for from Him and through Him are all things ; what is not of His 
love, that is of His anger. — [ Boehme's Signatura Rerum, chap. 8, par. 42.] 

That extremes meet is an axiom verified every day, but a 
more striking instance of its truth could hardly perhaps be 
found than in the similarity of mental attitude which so- 
called evangelical doctrines and those of Universalists 1 in- 
duce. 

The net result of both is jubilant confidence in a blessed- 
ness not depending on the conduct of human beings. 

Many years ago an old lady, nearing death, told me that 
she had no kind of anxiety about her readiness for it, be- 
cause she had ' ' rolled all her sins upon her Saviour. " From 
what I knew of her antecedents I inwardly feared that they 
might roll back upon her conscience with oppressive 
weight, when mundane spells were broken and intro- 
spective life began. 

Those cheerful reasoners, who call their mode of belief 
Universalism, roll all apprehensions arising from sin on a 
still wider breadth of repose — on the irresistible power of 
Divine order ; shifting all responsibility from man to God ; 
they seem to wonder that other people cannot make them- 
selves as comfortable by a close application of logic to the 
designs of the Most High God. The express declaration 

1 lllfitting names which one has to use, in default of better, to indicate 
people who hold a recognised set of opinions, and often characterise these by 
such terms. 



Jacob Boehme 183 

that His thoughts are not our thoughts, neither our ways 
His ways [ Isa. 55 : 8], seems to offer them no obstacle to 
this process : they will use the little measure of human 
reason for estimating infinitudes of Deific wisdom all the 
same. We have lately read in Light that this new 
Gospel of human irresponsibility is what "the pure theolo- 
gian has missed ; for he fails to see that salvation is no 
scheme, but an absolute necessary unhinderable evolution." 
— [Light, May 7th, 1 89 1 . ] It is no wonder surely that he 
fails to see what the whole tenor of the Bible contradicts, 
though here and there passages do occur which undeniably 
predict, the ultimate restitution of our race to lasting well- 
being ; but at what a terrific distance from our own is the 
ultimation ! Setting aside the consensus of inspired men, 
might not the records of geological science suggest a warn- 
ing to people who expect release from evil by the irresisti- 
ble force of evolution ? Its methods are formidable enough 
when good is being evolved in a terrestrial orb. Think of 
the long periods of glacial lifelessness, the tremendous vol- 
canic upheavals of successive layers of soil, the recurrent 
cataclysms from fire and water that took place before our 
earth was habitable, and imagine, when all this was neces- 
sary for securing material conditions, what convulsions of a 
spiritual nature may be the analogous preliminaries of evo- 
lution in undying souls. 

The testimony of unhappy spirits still bound to earth by 
the anguish of a remorseful memory, must surely have too 
much weight with Spiritualists to allow them to accept this 
misleading jeu d' esprit of logic, which, because God will 
be all in all when our solar system has collapsed and Time 
is at an end, cruelly foreshortens the perspective between 
now and then, and urges that even for guiltiness, "good 
will be the final goal of ill," — urges it upon us now, while 
on all sides the conscience is made drowsy by the asphyxia 
of sin, while the struggle for spiritual life amid the chaotic 
confusions of thought is more and more relaxed, and the 



184 Jacob Boehme 

sorceries of this present life obliterate anxieties about the 
next. I doubt the bravest Universalist assenting to the 
term " unhinderable evolution " when enduring, for a seem- 
ing eternity the irrefusable wages of sin in his own nature, 
the will at enmity with God's order, and the heart alone, in 
the horrors of self-loathing, with no escape from self, for 
"the will cannot break, and the soul must continue in the 
will." — [Boehme's Forty Questions, q. 18, par. 10.] "All 
earthly food and lust passeth away at the end of days, but 
the will remaineth standing eternally and the desire in the 
will." — [ Threefold Life, chap. 15, par. 15.] 

At that stage of evolution we may be very sure the goal 
of evil will be undeniable torment. Nor can we suppose 
the despair of those who suffer it, if repentance begins to 
quicken, finding any solace in such a line of thought as 
this, "Ye must be born from above." "Such perfection 
of life is a debt which the All-Father owes, and v/hich He 
will assuredly discharge to every-one of His children in due 
time." — [ Things to Come, p. 6.] It is not what the Father 
owes the child, but what the child has owed, and not paid, 
of obedience and love that will occupy the conscience- 
stricken mind when once the veil lifts. 

Now we must allow that the extreme Evangelical offers 
to "conscious sinners" a quietus fully as stupefying as 
those who teach the doctrine of irresponsibility; for ex- 
ample, in such lines as these taken from a popular hymn : 

It is finished, yes, indeed, 

Finished every jot ; 
Sinner, this is all you need, 

Tell me, is it not? 

Weary, working, burdened one, 

Wherefore toil you so ? 
Cease your doing ; all was done 

Long, long ago ! 

But there is this difference between the two dealers in 
spiritual narcotics — absurdly erroneous as such expressions 
sound, I believe those who use them are nearer to helpful 



Jacob Boehme 185 

ideas than they who can think of sin as a phenomenal 
dream, \ necessarily dispersed by death, for these seem to 
me both to deny the real essence of sin and to have no 
knowledge of what human will is. The acted or worded 
sin might be phenomenal if act and word were not conse- 
quent on the direction of the will — and even what is aim- 
less at the time must always be an evidence of previous, if 
not habitual motive ; volition, however closely masked, be- 
ing incessantly at work within ; nor can any determination 
of the will be without reaction on itself, because the imagi- 
nation of the heart which determines it is intensified by 
pursuit ; and its truly magical stimulus strengthens attrac- 
tion to any object of desire, be it good or evil. Nothing 
that the will is used to seek can be easily given up ; the 
whole bulk of spirits' communications for centuries past 
assures us that it is not given up when means for its exer- 
cise are withdrawn. 2 

This makes sin "the sting of death," a famished will de- 
prived of its prey. 

The conversion of the will is therefore the one indispen- 
sable condition on which Evangelicals offer comfort before 
sinful habits are at all overcome, and anyone who is intelli- 
gently Christian will see that there is better ground for such 
comfort than appears on the surface, for the will must be 
inclined to receive salvation through Jesus Christ before the 
seemingly precipitate offer, " Believe on the Lord Jesus and 
thou shalt be saved," — [Acts 16, 21] — can be accepted: 
and the will once converted from rebellion, all that desire to 
keep God's commandments and follow Christ's example 
can effect, is potentially won. 3 The truth of sudden and 

1 Suicides evidently believe it to be so, and as the delusion gains ground 
suicide must become even more common than it is. 

2 His substance is no more earthly, yet he carrieth along the earthly willing, 
and so plagueth and tormenteth himself therewith. — [ Treatise on the Incar- 
nation, part 3, chap. 4, par. 16.] 

3 A new will is formed by the Lord, from which the will of the proprium is 
entirely separated.— [Swedenborg's Spiritual Diary, vol. 4, 4,71 1.] 

>3 



186 Jacob Boehtne 

real conversion is often doubted because habits of sin are 
known to be almost ineradicable, and the assurance given 
to penitents that "all their sins shall be blotted out" natu- 
rally rouses contempt in minds hostile to Christianity, yet 
were such sayings interpreted by a deeper knowledge of 
human nature, what now appears foolishness might be 
justified even to rational people. From what are sins to be 
blotted out ? Not, assuredly, from the imperishable records 
of all that has been, but from the imagination of the heart, 
which must be vain and evil, until the will has turned back 
from alluring images of good to its divine and central mag- 
net. It is this magic faculty which must be cleansed by 
"the Blood of Christ" (the highest tincture of Divine love), 
not only from seductive images, but from the dismaying 
memories of sin, which can so dominate the unconverted 
mind as to make reformation seem impossible ; and what 
people suppose themselves to be they generally are in con- 
duct. And, besides, the effect of all sinfulness is confusion : 
Self-hood unreconciled to God "loses itself in the dim an- 
archy of a sphere without a centre." 

The thought of a loving Saviour strongly impressed on a 
mind in this state is like the first distinct indication of the 
sun's whereabouts in a hopelessly cloudy day. 

"Thoughts open the spirit that it may come to the will " 
and "the Divine fire of the soul was through sin shut up, 
which none could unshut and kindle, but only the love of 
God in this incorporated grace covenant." "Now, if the 
soul does but a little imagine into the love of God, the Di- 
vine life becometh stirring "; and if that spark of life is not 
quenched again by permitted sin, desire for grace and par- 
don will strengthen, and then all that man can do is se- 
cured ; for " man hath the death in him whereby he may 
die unto the evil " and " the desire standeth in our will, but 
the conversion standeth in God's mercy." ( I use Boehme's 
words because they give my meaning better and more 
briefly than any others could.) 



Jacob Boehme 187 

Thou must create a will out of thy soul and with the 
same go forth out of evil, wickedness, and malice into God 
. . . the willing spirit that will kindle thy soul, and 
then reach after the life and spirit of Christ, and thou wilt 
receive it ; which will newregenerate thee with a new 
willing, which will abide with thee. — [ Incarnation, part 2, 
chap. 9, pars. 26, 29.] 

The idea of anything is its soul. — [ Nature's Finer Forces, 

P. I37-.] 

It is while even the initiatory stages of conversion are 
precarious that one shudders to hear some modes of speech 
applied, such as "accepted in the beloved," to a person 
still a stranger to any kind of self-denial, though cultivating 
a holy imagination. It is true that in Christ's most gracious 
parable the father runs to meet the long-lost son while he 
was "yet a great way off," but the son had arisen ; so 
must the will of everyone rouse to lay hold on the righteous- 
ness of Christ because that only can avail us, which is sub- 
stantiated by our own desire. * 

It is the necessity of this initial action of the human will 
which both Universalists and Evangelicals seem to ignore. 
Both trust to the inevitable evolution of goodness ; the one 
because omnipotent love wills it ; the other because full as- 
surance of salvation by faith in the completed work of the 
Redeemer cannot, they think, be mollified by subsequent 
backslidings ; with regard to this last persuasion, perhaps 
no better answer could be given to it than the words found 
in Ezek. 18 '.26, and Matt. 25 : 1 1, 12. In one case iniqui- 
ty, in the other a neglect of the conditions requisite for 
grace, hindered spiritual progress. 

As to Universalists, I think some modifying ideas might 
be gained by them if the relations of a human father to his 
young children were attentively studied : he is comparative- 
ly omnipotent ; he can alter their circumstances for weal or 

1 Justification is effected by the blood of Christ in man ; in the soul itself. — 
[Election, chap. 10, par. 119.] 



1 88 Jacob Boehtne 

woe at pleasure, but he cannot — be they ever so weak — 
compel them to say or do what they have set their will 
against, for they brought in with life a force which the 
originator of their earthly existence cannot constrain to 
obedience. Tyranny can break down that force, and with 
it all the gladness and vigour of nature : a parent's love 
withholds him from any such risk, and thus limits power. 
This, on a very minute scale, is an exact picture of what 
Boehme teaches us as to the restraint of Deific Omnipotence 
in winning men or devils back to their allegiance — in pre- 
venting the arrest of orderly evolution caused by their own 
self-will. "God," he tells us, " cannot fight against God," 
and in every immortal spirit there is a "sparkle of Deity." 
If Divine love could put forth irresistible power and coerce 
the will of the creature, the deep sighs of its pity, which 
thrill here and there in both Old and New Testament, 
would be meaningless. Our own hearts feel them to be 
the utterance of sorrow and not figures of speech. 

In such sentences as these the yearning expostulations of 
love cannot be mistaken. 

"Oh that they were wise, that they understood this, 
that they would consider their latter end ! — [Deut. 32 : 29.] 

"Oh that My people had harkened unto Me and Israel 
had walked in My ways." — [ Psa. 81 : 13.] 

"Thus saith the Lord, What iniquity hath your fathers 
found in Me, that they have gone far from Me, and walked 
in vanity, and are become vain ? . . . Have I been a 
wilderness unto Isreal ? a land of darkness ?" — [Jer. 2 : 5, 

3>-] 

"Oh My people, what have I done unto thee ? and where- 
in have I wearied thee ? testify against Me. " — [ Micah 6:3.] 

" Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often would I 
have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather 
her brood under her wings, and ye would not." — [Luke 

I3-34-] 
Having come to this point, " ye would not " yield to the 



Jacob Boehme 189 

will of Almighty God, there is no honest escape from ref- 
erence to the unfathomable mystery of free-will ; and per- 
ceiving, as I do, that no one, however wise or learned, tries 
to explore it without breaking thought against one or other 
of two opposing truths — that God is omnipotent, and that 
man has ability to choose or refuse what is presented to 
him for choice — I know for me to pretend to throw any 
light on the subject would be absurd : not so to try and ex- 
plain why its mystery never darkens my own intellectual 
light. Every docile student of Boehme's revelations could 
witness, 1 suppose, to having the same privilege. 1 For 
while philosphers reason about the will of man as an attri- 
bute, assigning to it in their theories more or less of intrin- 
sic power, Boehme shows that in the last analysis it is the 
man himself ; 2 that by his will he is a creature individual- 
ised in the ocean of life ; proving that a will has separated 
itself from the whole will of the supreme God into divisional 
existence ; and the method of this transaction from an un- 
realised idea to creatureliness, is given in the following 
words as intelligibly, perhaps, as by any number of quota- 
tions. 

"The eternal word breathes forth itself into an infinite- 
ness of plurality — [Sixth Epistle, pars. 21, 24] — and brings 
the plurality of knowledge into imagination, and the imag- 
ination into desire, and the desire into nature and strife, 
till it comes to fire . . . the fire giveth soul," 3 (by 

1 To such learners it is a grief and astonishment to see all that is spent year 
after year in publishing sermons, snippets of devotional reading, and torrents 
of tracts, while works of such inestimable value as Boehme's smaller treatises, 
which would cost little to reprint, cannot be obtained except in very rare 
copies. The answer to the third of his Theosophic Questions would appease 
doubts that shake the faith of thousands of people, but no one cares to repro- 
duce what theologians discredit or despise. 

* 2 Swedenborg uses just those words in Arcana Coelestia, io,jjj : "No 
one can be compelled to good because nothing which is of compulsion in- 
heres, for it is not his. That becomes his which is done from freedom, for 
what is from the will is from freedom and the will is man himself." 

3 Perhaps a few sentences of Rama Prasad's most instructive book may af- 



190 Jacob Boehme 

nature here understand the first forms of nature, the astrin- 
gency and mobility which strive against each other till their 
conflict strikes out the involved fire of an antecedent will.) 
A yet deeper opening in the abyss was granted to Boehme, 
which I think Greek scholars may claim for Plato before 
him. He teaches that an idea or thought in the Deific 
mind ' originated the separated creaturely will. "The 
image," he wrote, "was not a substance but a will to a 
substance." Nor does he allow us to think that the mode 
of man's creation was exceptional, though, as to this uni- 
verse, it was the highest pitch of Divine imagination which 
brought into manifest life the image and likeness of God. 
"The centre of everything," he asserts, "is spirit from the 
original of the Word. 2 The separation or distinction in the 
thing is own-self, will of its own self-impression or com- 
paction, where every spirit introduceth itself into substance 
according to its essential desire." 

Everything, includes of course, crystals, plants, and ani- 
mals : little as we can discern the action of a will in plants 
it is indisputable ; a plant has its will and makes it valid, 
as many a weaker growth finds to its cost. . 

But are we to conclude that all creaturely wills originate 
from ideas in the Divine wisdom, i.e., the efflux of Deity ? 

ford some glint of light on this last sentence : "At every moment of time, 
i.e., in every truti — are millions of truti — perfect organisms in space. The 
units of time and space are the same . . . every truti of space is a per- 
fect organism." — [Nature's Finer Forces, p. 81.] 

1 Our minds "out of which do spring so many various thoughts, where 
every thought hath again a centre to a will, that so out of a conceived thought 
a substance may be produced, hi such a manner are all spirits created out of 
the Eternal Mind. — [ Threefold Life, chap. 4, pars. 30, 31.] 

2 Anyone who has seen Mrs. Watts Hughes' Voice Figures will better un- 
derstand how "spirit is from the original of the Word" the breath that 
causes the vibration of sound determines the figure — the formative idea which 
is the first beginning of a "will to a substance," and the will spirit concen- 
trating the action of the seven forms of nature in that focus (the idea) brings 
it to ultimation in a denser sphere of existence. — [ Voice Figures, published 
by Hazell, Watson, and Viney, 1 Creed-lane, Ludgate-hill, London, E. C. ] 



Jacob Boehme 191 

What goes on in the passage above quoted saves us from 
that supposition, "the formability of bodies existeth out of 
the experience of the willing, where everything's centre, as 
a portion of the outspoken Word, re-outspeaketh itself and 
frameth itself into separability, after the kind and manner 
of the Divine speaking." — [Knowledge of God and all 
things, pars. 11, 12. (Almost identical with Boehme's 
Sixth Epistle. ) ] 

This justifies the belief that the idea, will, and desire of 
inferior beings in the supersensual world may originate 
creatures — not immortal, as on the highest plane the 
"spiration of the Word created man." 1 I find it helps my 
faith in the loving-kindness of God not to believe that all 
hideous animals and more loathsome reptiles were spoken 
forth by Him. Look at a rhinoceros or alligator, and even 
some kinds of fish to feel this. The hypothesis that these 
embody the foul ideas of minds not holy will explain St. 
Martin's curious saying about insects. " One need not," 
he says in a very striking chapter on The Third Nature and 
Insects, "worry oneself as naturalists do to classify insects 
in the regular order of animated nature. In relation to 
nature they are evidently apocryphal creatures ; they are 
excluded or cut off, so to speak, from the true family line, 
and the name given to them, insect from the Latin word 
insecare, alone implies what I have just shown to be their 
origin. 2 Returning from this digression to the point 
chiefly in view — if the will is the factor of creaturely exist- 
ence, all that exists having proceeded, by however many 
gradations, from the One Holy Will — two deductions ap- 
pear to me to be inevitable. First, that no human creature 

1 Creation, which implieth chiefly a compaction and bringing down lower. 
— [ Dionysius Freher.] 

2 L. C. de St. Martin's L' Esprit des Choses, p. 164, vol 1. Boehme seems to 
have entertained a similar thought. "Elementary qualities at some times 
generate living flesh therein, as grasshoppers, flies, worms or creeping things." 
— [Aurora, chap. 17, par. 14.] 



192 Jacob Boehme 

can be a manifestation of the "sum of all beings." ] 

For even in numbers no one can have for its product a 
unit of equal value. 

Secondly, since every derivative fraction of the all-com- 
prehending One, such as angel or man, is energised by the 
will of God (in nature) its will cannot be amenable to 
compulsion. To this may be objected the common fact of 
one human will being subdued by the force of another, and 
so in our own minds may one form of volition conquer an- 
other ; but this is not equivalent to destroying a faculty 
which, if such things can be brought into comparison with- 
out profanity, would be similar to the Holy Will of God 
annihilating the will of a human creature. Besides, even 
between man and man or man and woman, where the will 
seems to be conquered, we may be sure that the semblance, 
of self-interest led to the surrender : after which a kind of 
hypnotism prolongs defeat. Again, the hopeless slavery of 
habit, which seems to hold people fast to follies and vices 
they abhor, is often taken for proof that human will is not 
free. Might we not as well say that limbs have no power 
of movement because many are paralysed, and some can be 
made rigid and incapable of self-direction by mesmeric art ? 

I have no doubt that thousands of human beings are hyp- 
notised by evil spirits to whose incitements they have yield- 
ed while yet free. In a very terrible degree proving the 
truth of the saying, " To whom ye yield yourselves servants 
to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey." — [Rom. 
6: 16.] 

To conclude, honesty obliges me to confess that since I 
firmly believe that after slow and tremendous discipline, at 
last the most violently and discordant fractional will is to be 
brought into divine harmony, it may fairly be said, why, 
then, need you doubt God's ability to do now at once what 

1 " For myself I am no more assured of my own ultimate perfecting than I 
am of the perfecting of every Ego in which the sum of all beings is self-mani- 
fested." — [G. W. Allen's Address to the Christo-Theosophical Society, 
November 17th, 1891.] 



Jacob Boehme 193 

by more slowly working influences is to be affected ? and 
if that is possible must not the Holy One design and pro- 
mote the discords of sin? — [Incarnation, part 1, chap. 5, 
pars. 132, 133.] 

If nothing already alleged prevents this inference I can 
only answer — by what may seem a weak evasion — that as 
all created beings in the strictest sense inhabit the life of the 
supreme source of life, it is necessarily impossible for us, 
minutest atoms of that life, to conceive aright of its modes 
of action : that, therefore, the attitude of thought prescribed 
by the Father of Spirits must be our nearest approach to 
wisdom. Now the tenor of Scripture from beginning to 
end is deceptive if man has not freedom of choice. Deny- 
ing that freedom, we can hardly accept other Bible doctrines 
with any show of consistency. It is, I know, a very old- 
fashioned position to rest in when reason is non-plussed, 
but for me, the summary of wisdom recorded by Job re- 
mains most uncomfortably clear. "Toman he said, Be- 
hold to fear God that is wisdom, and to depart from evil 
that is understanding." 



MAY 9 1901 



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